Presumably this means no targeting the user's preferences and just showing everything by newest/most liked.
There's things like hashtag searches and whatnot, but none of it is algorithms; in the sense we understand it to mean, here, these are not manipulative algorithms designed to keep people on a site and keep ads rolling by.
on the fediverse, there are bots to curate content such as "most liked", one can subscribe to these bots to see such "views" of the feed.
there's absolutely no reason for any of that crap to be built in, other than that's how reddit (and HN) do it.
Fediverse absolutely has "algorithms". People generally want them. I agree that it's broadly less user-hostile (I'm very much a fan), but it's very much moving down the same paths as twitter (mastodon), reddit (lemmy), etc.
It is an algorithm on a data structure, but it is not an algorithm to drive ad impressions.
do you see the difference?
this is why people say "Algo" when talking about the latter, and "Algorithm" when talking with other like-minded people about data structures and algorithms.
A fully human-curated feed would not be "algorithmic", in contrast. Print newspapers do this, and sometimes online ones to varying degrees, and most blogs. You could even let people build their own (e.g. "boost to my popular feed [at position X/newest/oldest]"). Essentially none do this though, they all choose algorithmic ones of varying complexity - it doesn't make them non-algorithmic to choose a simpler one.