this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
220 points (98.2% liked)

Fediverse

28354 readers
610 users here now

A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!

Rules

Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] density@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

because when you load any page listing posts, you don't want your server to have to go and download the actual entire comment thread for every post that is listed. And then have to go and count how many there are.

Because it would be slow, especially with multiple servers involved. Every time you loaded your home page or a community the server would have to start from scratch gathering the data. It would be more accurate but it would be very hard. And not give a lot of extra value.

So it's more efficient to have a piece of data attached to the post that just reports the number of comments. Same way as there is a piece of data that contains the title, the name of the person who posted it etc. And that value is updated in some way. Apparently in a way that has not yet been perfected. :)