One technique that can be useful is imposing domain-specific restrictions, then passing responsibility down the chain.
For example, most people only have a handful of recent conversations; can you get away with ignoring distant-past conversations when it comes to read/unread marking? If so, you could send recent normalized data to the frontend and let it derive the unread state client-side. React has some nice tools for efficiently deriving state from server-sent data.
This isn't always the best solution, but it's something to consider.
For example, most people only have a handful of recent conversations; can you get away with ignoring distant-past conversations when it comes to read/unread marking? If so, you could send recent normalized data to the frontend and let it derive the unread state client-side. React has some nice tools for efficiently deriving state from server-sent data.
This isn't always the best solution, but it's something to consider.