Yeah this is more like a return to the norm, just more blatant and overt. And even earlier than 100 years, before America was strong enough to reach out into the world and do this to other countries, it was manifest destiny against the indigenous. You won’t find a corner of this planet unmolested by American imperialism, and the hardest hit are still problems that persist to this day.
Whether it’s the Panama Canal, the Monroe doctrine, the Banana republics, or atrocities in Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos. Intervening in civil wars and conflicts that would eventually create Taiwan and South Korea and Israel as American vassal states built with the purpose of serving American interests. Fomenting a coup in Iran over oil which would usher in the Iranian revolution, or smashing Iraq which created a power vacuum for isis to form. Wherever and whenever America reaches out into the world, death and destruction will typically follow. And if it isn’t leaving a shattered and broken state for whoever is left to pick up the pieces, then it’s funding and arming one side of a war to create a satellite state to enrich itself which leaves a conflict ready to reignite at any moment.
I don’t see how it couldn’t theoretically be done on the user’s end with the right client. Choose a certain feed and the client takes the information shared in the incoming post data like the title, description, community, vote count, and instance. Then isolates each post, classifies it, ranks it based on user preferences stored locally like upvote and downvote history, and the client then chooses the order of posts to show to the user. And if you wanted to go there you could even have a local simple machine learning model creating descriptions of image posts to cover everything.
Granted I actually know nothing about programming, but I don’t think you’d actually be processing that much data if you kept the algorithm simple. All it actually has to do is just choose a ranking based on metrics and keywords and assigned values. It also doesn’t have to achieve maximum retention or have single digit millisecond load time, it just has to give people a customized experience.
The problem is that all this overhead and maintenance would require some form of monetization, like injecting ads into the feed. Something like that has almost no demand right now, because the options we have for sorting are good enough and the people who want custom algorithms don’t know what federation means and aren’t paying. And honestly I think it might be better without it, because personally I don’t want lemmy to go mainstream and am happy with where it is now. I sort by top of the day in All, which basically crowdsources ranking anyways.