Yeah, there’s an “algorithm” here but rather than a black box of trade secrets and manipulation it’s entirely open source, and mathematically simple.

mastodon idk, it probably has a similar algo for its Explore page but I think the user feed is just made up of posts from people you follow in chrono order.

how is that not “how it works” exactly? I don’t care as much about the integrity of the spec, though ofc web standards are important, as I do about the integrity of independent communities.

We don’t know what threads will do, but currently, federated instances do share up and downvotes, no? and that does affect the ranking of a post on all instances, not just the one where the up/downvotes were made.

It has an impact. If threads algorithm heavily promotes something inflammatory, and that thing gets a bunch of upvotes from threads users, said post will dominate our feeds too.