The “known set” for a server is usually bigger than for a client - that is the difference. Algorithmic recommendations will for instance often include stuff you don’t follow, so your client would presumably not even have received the activity it would want to recommend.
I think I’m also confused as to whether this dedicated sorting/recommending application you are suggesting lives in the server or in the client (or as a separate client?) or in a third place (third party server I guess). Which is it?
Yes but the inbox itself is chronological - which means that if I were to make another sorting, I would need to download and keep in a local database every single activity from my chronological inbox, no? That doesn’t seem feasible.
Okay let’s take the example of Lemmy to be more concrete. I really don’t understand how Lemmy could be made as a client. Lemmy takes all known posts on the instance (including stuff you don’t personally follow, in the case of the “All” feed) and sorts them in a clever way that prioritizes recent posts with many upvotes.
To make this sorting, you need a global view of all known posts and all their up/down-votes. This is a lot of data (gigabyte scale) and sorting it is not a fast process. I do not see how it is feasible for a client application to perform this work (also just seems super wasteful for every single client to perform this work instead of the server doing it once).
Could you explain how Lemmy could be done as a client? Because I really don’t see how.
You tried to explain it before here but I didn’t get it and you didn’t explain further:
Maybe you could elaborate on this explanation?