Or instead of individual votes do a dump like an rss. Like only update when I ask every 10 minutes or so. Get everything from x - y time and just give me the totals. Probably only good for smaller instances though.

[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago

Its not that easy because users can undo their votes, or change an upvote to downvote. Thats why we store every individual vote in the database. Also votes from defederated instances are discarded, which wouldnt work if there is only a total vote count from the community. And in general Activitypub is push-based, not pull-based.