I don't think there is any algorithm magic in mastodon. your feed is who you follow and who they boost. maybe its time for you to have a clean up.

Just like OP I also mean the recommended stuff https://mastodon.social/explore

Same shit as on Twitter and Bluesky

Yeah I have an account on that Mastodon server and even logged-in, that page shows popular (rage-bait) content regardless of my personal preferences. It filtered by language but not region (so it was mostly content from another continent).

However, my actual Mastodon feed only has content from people I follow, without any recommendations, and that works great.

This is the recommended stuff as seen from on one single server. It doesn't represent one's experience.

The whole point of Mastodon is to only get what you want, not the rest. It's easy to build your own network of sources. The explore feed is useless :)

Oh, huh, I didn't know anyone used that.