I think "Counting the number of request" necessary to do something is a good idea to get an idea if things work. It is like the infamous back of the envelope calculation from physics. It's a quick method to get an idea what is going on. Often the answers are correct.

As an example, due to me reading about it again, that ActivityPub Client To Server as specified. In order to see if there is new content you need to make a request. So if you want to update the content of your client every 10 seconds, you are making 6 requests per minute. If you use technology such as websockets, you are left with 1 request total.

@helge one long running request which is arguably harder to scale and has its own issues...

@thisismissem @helge http sse (server sent events) might work here? assuming http/2 support