But it is though? I'm not talking about everything facebook provides, but main content page is just a list of posts with with discussion underneath them. Sure, you can embed some media into the it, but still. There is nothing inherently different about structure of facebook post compared to a post on a forum.

And yet, despite everything facebook is doing, the most (and only) reliable way to load new comments under the post is to force refresh entire site. Except it's not easy anymore, because facebook tries to be SPA.

So we gave up simple and reliable solutions in favour of over engineering that doesn't even work. And all that for no good reason, other then being trendy and having an SPA

>But it is though?

At some point quantitative change achieves a qualitative effect. I would think Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter have all reached that qualitative effect to change from being just a discussion forum.

However qualitatively the social functions of these apps present an extra functionality missing from traditional discussion forums. Being able to track users, notifications of the users updates, blocking certain users from being in the message - which is a traditional messaging function not found in discussion forums. Suggestions of people or subjects to follow given on what you have done in the past, weighted based on various algorithms to determine how recent your past activity was and what your current interests seem to be.. I'm sure you could think of a load of other functions that are not traditional discussion forum functionalities.

I don't know if you are doing that intentionally, but you are completely ignoring the context of the argument, which is advocating of mixing and matching statically generated content and using component based spas only where it's needed.

In the parent coment alone I emphasized that I acknowledge that Facebook as a whole provides more then just a forum, but it's core content inherently doesn't differ much from being one.

Moreover, functionality like notifications or suggestions are inherently server generated, as such they don't require content itself to be served in specific way.

Inherently different things:

- the social graph underlying every post and content producer (one of the reasons FB introduced graphql)

- the recommendation and advertising algos that are interdependent on the content feed

- the realtime “fire hose” nature of the feed integrating a huge number of disparate data sources

Again I don’t like FB the app and I’m not on it. But even its core product is vastly more complex than a forum.

FWIW I’ve developed social networks and forums professionally; social networks are inherently more interactive. My first real exposure to front end dev was when I worked on a social network. If I had to build the same webapp today there is zero consideration of writing it as a backend rendered application or restricting to only progressive enhancement. It would only put off the inevitable migration to real FE tech.

The things you mentioned are backend dependant, though, not intrinsic to how you render and present them.

What specific aspects of facebook's comment section under post make it that json response is so much better then a html one?