In many ways, Mastodon feels like rewinding the clock on social media back to the early days of Twitter and Facebook. On the consume side, that means that your home feed has no algorithm (this can be disorienting at first).
Practically, it means that you see only what you want to see and only see it linearly. You never wonder “why am I seeing this and how do I make it go away?”. Content can only enter your home feed via your followed tags or handles and the feed is linear like the early days of social media.
I think they mean that fedi didn’t take social media back because it never left. It’s the users who went back.
Like if we all joined Myspace again we wouldn’t say that Myspace rewound social media. People forget that the fediverse has been around a very long time, it’s not new.
Older than Facebook and Twitter?
I’m not sure if I would go as far as gp to claim older, but statusnet and ostatus which were early parts of the fediverse date from within a couple years of facebook’s general availability. I would say the fediverse about as old as Facebook (2008 vs 2006, close enough?)