Toxic feed algorithms that serve Meta or X are bad, but that does not mean that we can't do something better ourselves here.
For many years I have been using a fork of mastodon_digest that scores posts by engagement and emails me a daily summary. It's open source and helps me to discover what has been going on in my timeline without following it all the time.
If you see me fav-ing your posts like 18h after the post. That's probably why!