Not who you responded to but it depends entirely on the location. In the northeast there is decent and consistent appreciation and there has been for decades because it has always been populated. But home appreciation over 20, 30, or 50 years will struggle to beat the S&P500. Factor in property taxes and upkeep and you may just barely keep up with inflation. Just from inflation $216k in 06 would be $358k in 2025. As an asset its primary function is being a store of wealth that happens to be the roof on your head, something you can refinance to borrow money, and something to sell basically to pay for whatever you downgrade to when you enter the stage of preparing for death, whether it’s a condo or a nursing home.
All the money to be made comes from buying in bulk and renting out to people who cannot afford because everyone bought to rent out, while local government restricts supply through zoning because it would lower property values of everyone who only had their house as retirement because wages have not kept up with productivity or inflation and pensions and unions have been gutted.
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.