Technically sorting your Lemmy feed by Hot or Active is an algorithm.

Youtube has served me weird out of place political content before, I don't know. Like in an ideal world they would have a recommendations tab, that's separate from the chronological feed from my subscriptions.

There are other places to get recommendations of channels to follow

No. That’s an algorithm.

So is filtering to only friends and hiding blocked users.

So no algo, no feed at all really.

because these politicians know extremely little about the Internet

I started participating in online communities in the 2000s. The "social media" we had back then was web forums, organized by topics and sorted chronologically. I was young enough at the time that it is now permanently stored in my brain that that is the normal way the Internet should be like, and everything popularized since then (recommendation algorithms, the idea that we should follow people instead of topics, even the idea that websites shouldn't be specific to certain topics) is a deviation from normalcy.

I know, rationally, that those deviations from normalcy are now the new normal (even the fediverse is "only" an attempt to improve further on that, not a move toward the Internet of the 2000s), but there is still a part of my brain that doesn't accept this.

But I very strongly suspect that those politicians, in Australia and elsewhere, who are now trying to regulate the Internet, never posted anything to a traditional web forum, or edited a wiki, or anything like that. To them, "social media" became a thing (at all!) in around 2008 to 2010 when they created Twitter and Facebook accounts in order to communicate with their voters. (Reality check: social media has been a thing since, at the latest, the 1980s, when Usenet was invented.)

If they don't know that the Internet is not Facebook, then it's unsurprising when they regulate the internet as if it’s all just Facebook, so that all that will be left is Facebook. Sad times we are living in.