Discovery is just the worst, lemmy has a problem with it as well but it’s somehow just amplified on Mastodon. There is basically no way for me to organically find things I would be interested in. If I don’t already directly know how to find someone or something I want then I’m never going to come across it.
Compare that with blue sky which has a basic Discovery algorithm that I can pretty easily tune to what I want using filter lists I was able to very quickly get it to understand what type of artists I’m interested in following and what type of content I want to see and what I don’t want to see and through that I have discovered a bunch of artists I otherwise never would have known about.
Mastodon works good enough if you only want to follow very specific people that you already know about and can easily find but if you’re hoping to actually organically discover content I found it awful. The feeds for instances are pretty generic they don’t try to tailor to your interests it’s just a dump of whatever is on that instance or whatever it’s Federated with depending on how you view it which basically just guaranteed it was always filled with stuff I couldn’t give less of a shit about.
It’s very possible that the interface has changed since I last used it but at least when I used it the interface was pretty clunky and not very fun to use at least in my opinion, I did host my own instance for a little while and used a Twitter bot to copy the art of artists I liked over to a mastodon feed but you know all those Bots broke a little while before it became X so ended up giving up on that
I’m not sure you understand how a suggestion algorithm works, it’s not something that can be run locally without having to then load and process thousands of messages. There is no aspect of that that could be run locally while simultaneously not having to load all the messages you’re attempting to sort and make recommendations on.
It is not at all equivalent to a word filter, a word filter is not attempting to find something, it’s a filter that applies to things that are already being loaded regardless. When a post comes in the word filter looks to see whether or not it has a word that needs to be filtered. An algorithm needs to find new content out of all the content available and then attempt to determine whether or not it’s something that should recommend meaning the client would have to load thousands upon thousands of random posts from the Federalists in order to make that algorithm work