I would suggest prioritizing user-choice as the north star when thinking this through. A default sort by timestamp could be good for many cases.

I could imagine different tabs in a UI being good ways to navigate different algorithms, but there are probably lots of alternatives creative developers could come up with which solve different problems for different kinds of apps. nostr:npub12vkcxr0luzwp8e673v29eqjhrr7p9vqq8asav85swaepclllj09sylpugg, for example, chooses the UI of a filter icon in the upper right to select different algos. I could imagine a subreddit/stackernews-like view of the links being discussed/zapped in my nearby network recently. It would make it a lot easier for me to “catch up” if I’ve been away for a day. I haven’t seen a good example of an interface like this being explored yet with nostr.

I’m not convinced that letting people choose an algorithm as their default way of browsing has to go bad. I would want to know more about the following: “what are the goals of the algorithm?”, “can the user evaluate the purpose simply?”, “is the user empowered to change the default algorithm if they don’t find it’s serving their needs?”.

I just think the goal should be that the algorithm is in service of the user’s needs and not just attempting to generate incremental page views to serve more ads (like a corp algo is usually designed to do). Having algos with very different goals than we’ve seen before could help us discover a way where things go very right.