Engineer I guess… Thief is the objectively better enterprise programmer option but I don’t know why I always forget about it and just write a ternary ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

This makes a ton of sense and I think you probably solved this mystery for me.

“Oh I need to iterate over something, and keep track of new information as I do it, therefore I should be able to create ‘dynamic variables’ as I progress.”

I distinctly remember asking this question during a 100 level programming class but I just can not remember why I’d ever want to do this?

What problem could I have possibly have been trying to solve where this would seem like the answer.

That’s just how federation works. You’ve federated with an instance/user so now your self hosted instance will be updated.

Is there a reason you’re concerned about the requests? The payloads should be relatively small, and unless you’re running on some really old hardware, one request a second with a small payload should not have any noticeable impact.

Ok boomer