Yeah the financial crisis bankrupted the banks themselves. The structural foundation of the financial and banking industries were interconnected to bad mortgages that were distributed into financial instruments everywhere and speculated on like crazy by everyone, because they were mortgages and considered safe like bonds. Part of the reason why companies like GM went bankrupt was because their financial arm was significantly invested in mortgages, banks failed because their entire financial model was centered on mortgage returns, and people defaulted on houses en masse because they were allowed to get mortgages they were never able to afford.
But no one investing in stocks, particularly tech stocks, is doing so without explicitly gambling that money. A lot of venture capital might collapse, retail investors are going to get shit on, the general economy will slow as it does during a recession, but mostly this will play out like the dotcom bubble and be a large asset correction in the stock market. A few years of correction, consolidation of the industry, and everyone will pile onto the next bubble in a decade.
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.