Springing some thoughts off a comment reply I made...
Not just today, but for a very long time, I see the anti-algorithm debates bring up that we got along just fine on the internet before, that we did our own discoverability. And we did! But...the internet was built for discoverability back then! Here's the thing: if you come to cohost and want to find people interested in disc golf, your only option is to look at #disc golf, which has one poster that posts consistently and very little else. Now you're pretty much at a dead end in terms of finding others (like people who may not tag their posts). But in the "old internet" what you would do is...join a disc golf forum. Everyone there would be discussing that. And you'd just be a member of tons of different forums based on your interests. You wouldn't join an "everything forum" and then desperately try to find what individual users posted about your interests. And the closest thing to that would be Something Awful, which is STILL not the same thing because in SA you'd find the disc golf THREAD and then follow that, and still have everything related to your interest in one place. Even individual non social websites you had directories, webrings, and search that actually worked unlike the SEO nightmare we have now.
My point isn't even "we need algorithmic suggestions" or "we need cohost users to make webrings". I don't know what the best solution here is (since "forget social media and go back to forums" won't happen). My point is just that the internet landscape shifted in a way that made us need new solutions in the first place. For some sites algorithmic follow or post suggestions is their new solution. It's not the only option. But you can't solve the discoverability issues of modern social media without recognizing that we do not interact with the Internet in the same way as we used to. Joining cohost or any other social site then trying to find people who like gymnastics is a totally different experience than trying to find the gymnastics forum and signing up. And it has to be acknowledged that there may not BE gymnastics posts on this site for some people (random example, I didn't look, humor me here) and those people won't enjoy themselves here. Curating your own timeline is something that could use better tools here, but it doesn't get acknowledged enough that some things just won't be here. Whereas in The Good Old Days you'd just find the place where those things were, usually somewhere focused on JUST that thing. The Internet has changed!