I looked around and struggled to find out what it does?

My guess would be that it notifies you of when new posts are made to communities you subscribe to. But that sounds like a lot, so I’m really not sure.

Otherwise, is it me or does the wording here not speak for itself?

  • Dave@lemmy.nzEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    Having so many people permanently connected to the server wasn’t manageable for the early Lemmy software, and I doubt that has changed. WebSockets made more sense when Lemmy users were measured in the hundreds.

    The notifications were super annoying once the userbase started to take off!

    • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      Oh I know … I’m thinking of a feature where any community is allotted a certain amount of “live chat time” where they can run a websocket session for live chats. Presumably there’s a way to manage the resource overhead and get to a sweet spot. Plus, instead of updating everything, it’d only have to be comments in a single post.

      • Dave@lemmy.nzEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        Oh I get what you mean now. Yeah, live threads are probably fine. There wouldn’t be the same overhead of every single user being permanently connected to the server, only the ones actually on the thread. So long as every thread wasn’t a live one it would probably be fine.

        To be fair, the existing polling solution might be able to be leveraged for this as well. I think it’s probably not so much a technical challenge as it is a nice to have feature when Lemmy doesn’t have a lot of must have features (though it’s improving).