As I follow more and more people on Mastodon/the fediverse, I really do want SOME sort of solution to cut through the noise. It's not that I want some people's posts to be de-ranked or hidden, but it becomes overwhelming when so much is going on, and it's hard to track "where I was".
Something Sync for Reddit does that I like is allows you to hide viewed posts. I think that could be an interesting solution on the client side; it could even piggyback off of fave-ing posts, and NOT hide those.