@julian @angus A bad actor with some programming skill could send you a Note that's part of an infinite inReplyTo chain.
This gets even worse if you want to look at the replies collections of individual Notes - which could form an infinitely branching tree.
None of this happens if there's a One True Collection from which the whole thread can be fetched in one gulp.
@FenTiger@mastodon.social said in Traversing the reply chain when working with topics:
infinite inReplyTo chain.
I think this could be solved in part by the chain traversal sanity checking to ensure that the id is not already retrieved, but I'm not naive enough to assuming that that can't be circumvented.
... so yes, in that sense a limit makes sense from a security standpoint.