Do you prefer to implement paging based on message date or message count?

The choice between paging by message date and by their quantity depends on the use case and user experience requirements.

• Paging by quantity — a classic approach where a fixed number of messages are loaded (for example, 20). It is convenient when controlling data volume and simplicity of implementation are important.

• Paging by date — messages are loaded starting from a specific timestamp. This is useful if messages can arrive at different frequencies or if continuous and accurate temporal order needs to be maintained.

In messengers, a combined approach is often used: when loading history, messages are loaded by quantity, but when updating with new messages, the date is used to ensure no new messages are missed.

For example, if a user scrolls through history, they can load 20 messages back, and when new messages arrive, all messages from the last received message date are loaded.