I don’t think there really were 54k MAUs in the first place. It took me a few goes to find the right instance for me. Through some fedi drama I’ve had to move “home instance” last month. So last month I probably got counted as 2 MAUs.
But this month I’ve only been using this account.
When lemmy.world was having DDoS issues (are they still?) a lot of people made alts or moved completely and those would all be double counted.
Don’t they get funding from NL.net as well?
To be fair there are now off the shelf ai solutions available which were simply impossible 10 or even 5 years ago.
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.
How you do it is a hybrid of how you described.
One of the first optimisations the lemmy devs did with the Reddit exodus was to precompute the “hot score” of a post and store it in a field rather than trying to compute it “live” in every query. So the score gets updated every hour and also whenever there is some comment or change to the post.
And the server simply sorts by this value.
There is no reason similar sorting fields can’t be exposed via the API allowing the client (or some client eg with mod access or admin access) to store some arbitrary value to a column and then the server can happily sort by this column.
You’re pressing the tab key for auto completion right?
Do you have write permission on the file?