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?
I’m talking about the dev tools in the browser, not any notifications or anything. That this message appears in the console indicates that it’s broken in some way, as it’s an error message.
In fact my guess would be that the option is a vestige from back when lemmy kept the page constantly up to date with live updates. It’s was way too resource intensive so they let it go and maybe didn’t clean this up.
Yeah I understood that, but I don’t see that error. I do see like 10 other ones though, but not related to this setting!
I think you’re right. I found it on this page in the docs. It talks about it being a pop-up notification, which used to happen back when Lemmy used websockets to update the page in real time.
This docs seem to nail it down. Couldn’t find that. Thanks!
I had searched yesterday and couldn’t find it, but had another go and managed to find it.
I also asked in the Matrix lemmy general chat but no one seemed to know. Might get an answer from a dev at some point but I’m beginning to suspect it does nothing anymore.
Well the error I got in the browser suggests it needs to be in a web socket session or something, so there’s a chance the underlying backend code is still around and functional.
I’ve actually figured bringing the live updates thing back for temporary live chats could be an awesome feature.
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!
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.
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).
Fair, though I’m increasingly thinking multi-communities are pretty much “must-have”