I still maintain that using an algorithm that shows you what you talk about with no distinction on whether you talk about it because you hate it or love it was part of the problem, as it means you can easily see only more and more of what you hate. That encourages communities hostile to each other to essentially go to war, and that righteous feeling when you do something you feel is morally right(whether it is or not) just turned a whole bunch of people into unintentional rage addicts. Especially with the tools to easily dunk on other people via quote retweets amplifying the bad takes along with your own response, causing other people to jump on said bad take and spreading it to people who would otherwise have never seen it. Plus full text searches being used to monitor for any mention of specific terms to immediately jump on them or unleash bots to respond to them.
Compare that to pre-algo Twitter or Masto, where while it is harder to find things, you only see what you choose to see(without having to jump through hoops). Mastodon improved on the findability at least with the local and federated feeds, and if the local feed is horrible it's fairly frictionless to hop instances.
On the other hand, TikTok focused on improving the idea of the algorithm instead of ditching it and from what I hear managed to make progress on differentiating like vs hate so it actually does tend to give you positive things instead of negative. They also don't have the same character limit issues as they use video so they can actually include nuance. The downside though is that it's easy for the algorithm to be tweaked to hide things that China's government doesn't want discussed.
On the gripping hand, people have always formed into communities of like-minded folk and trying to cram vehemently opposed communities into a single space and force them to interact was never going to go well. Even with a no-algo setup allowing them to exist side by side without even realizing the other is there, the moment one side goes intentionally seeking trouble(and someone WILL) it'll all go into the crapper. Especially as long as people don't have a reason to not show their whole arse to the world on a whim.
Hence why I agree maybe it is a good thing for people to disaspora among the various services... a return to the old ways of the Internet instead of "The internet is 5 websites" and everyone all tries to cram into them like a clown car.
