mastodon.social is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
The original server operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit

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Mike P

@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.