I recently came across a proposal to create a marketplace of sorting algorithms for Lemmy, allowing users to browse, select, and even create their own custom sorting algorithms. This would provide more advanced users with additional ways to customize and sort content, and give the community the ability to share their creations. I’m curious to know if this is actually possible within the Fediverse and what your thoughts are on the idea. Would this be a valuable addition to Lemmy, or do you see any potential drawbacks?
If the server sends posts, and the client computes the ordering, the client has to do the sorting.
The “hot” thing is just server side caching of scores for a server side sort.
What you seem to be suggesting is that the server support storing post scores sent from clients so it can feed that sort back to the client. I don’t think that would scale for millions of users storing their preferred post sorting order on the server.
I was the guy who checked the performance issues on those queries and suggested the caching algorithm to the Devs so I know how it works and have a fairly reasonable understanding of the Lemmy schema.
Every single vote you make is already stored. Adding some “ranking vote” is not a big deal. It only has to scale on your own home instance. It’s not a matter of calling for millions of users.
If you run your own instance it will have to scale for 1 user.
The difference is the server doesn’t need to scan the giant vote table for ordinary polling or ranked posts.
Unless there was significant optimization work done on the DB schema, this approach would require joining the large posts table to the very large user-post-ranking table for each request for sorted posts.
This will kill DB performance without some sort of clustering or sharding.