Paging a list of orders is a solved problem. Paging a ranked home feed is not, and I found that out the boring way: a tester scrolled to page three of my Instagram-style feed and saw a post she had already liked on page one.

Nothing was "broken". Every query returned correct data. The feed was simply being re-ranked between requests, so the ground moved under the offset. This post is about that one slice of the problem, the read path and its cursors, and the five mistakes I made before it behaved. The write side (who gets pushed, who gets pulled) is a different story.

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