This is because Lemmy uses websockets to retrieve live data from the server. I imagine this was a good thing when Lemmy was unpopulated, but now it's just in the way. It's also causing strange bugs, like the vote count rapidly changing to wrong values, or a post just completely changing into a different one while you are reading it.

Websockets will be removed from Lemmy in 0.18, which should fix all of this.

My understanding is that at the moment, no. It's an artifact of when lemmy was unpopulated. I've heard rumblings that this is going to be changed in the near future though.

There is also some type of weird bug where, if you leave a post open for an hour, the content might get replaced by another post. Refreshing the page reverts it back to normal.

Known Bug.

That's a well known issue on large servers. I don't think the user can do anything about it, but it should be fixed soon.

If you see a post you want to check out there should be a keyboard shortcut for your OS that allows you to click the post and open it in a new window.

That's the only way I've found to 'grab' something interesting and check it out.

Ah so that's what's happening. Super frustrating. Thought my browser was breaking