Client side is completely out of the question here. You can’t just send millions of posts to every client hoping that they will order it themselves. Bluesky has a well thought out architecture that does that through server side feed gens, that can be decoupled from the App itself.

https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/federation-architecture

Discovery is just the worst, lemmy has a problem with it as well but it’s somehow just amplified on Mastodon

Totally agree. Mastodon is absolutely terrible at discovering new things. Explore tab is just feeding me a bunch of garbage, like cat pics (what is this, 2005?)

This is the initial reason for the invention of “The Algorithm” on social feeds, before it got sabotaged to push content with an agenda.