> ActivityPub puts timestamps on things so you can ask your Mastodon server for everything that's been updated since the last time you polled. RSS makes you poll over and over again and download everything. so instead of downloading X kb of content you could be downloading 20X kb if you are polling too fast, alternately you could be losing content if you poll to slow.
You have to download the feed when something changes, correct. But you do not and should not download the whole thing over and over again. That is exactly what If-Modified-Since [1] is for.
You have to download the feed when something changes, correct. But you do not and should not download the whole thing over and over again. That is exactly what If-Modified-Since [1] is for.
[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1945#section-10.9