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How fast can one really read 6000 post ? Assuming you read 100 post a minute, is that 1 hour of usage before getting cut off for the day? I dont really have a feeling how many posts a normal twitter user would go through in a minute.
I assume it's like api calls where it costs me two calls to write this response. One to view yours and one to write this reply.
Right now there are about 200 posts on this thread so if I scroll through this thread it would cost me 200 calls.
Im not familiar with the lemmy source code but i would imagine it would batch fetch comments all at once with one api call (or maybe a few if the thread is big enough). Fewer api calls is less load on a lemmy server, less chance that any one of the calls them fails, etc. At least, if i wrote lemmy id i would do something like that.
It stops scrapers mostly, but also public frontends like nitter from serving Twitter data to more than a person or two. It's a pretty transparent "hit the low hanging fruit" attempt to get people logged in and viewing ads that they can track to more-expensive-per-click users (ones that can be targeted more specifically than browser fingerprinting + geodata