I’ve been working on a project where I’m trying to understand how Discord or Slack bots function on the backend. I know bots typically use WebSocket connections to receive real-time updates, and REST APIs to send responses or updates.

My question is: how do bots manage to update messages in real-time? For instance, when a bot edits or updates a message in a channel, it happens almost instantly like WebSockets, but traditionally, this should be happening over a REST API. Similarly, webhooks also seem to perform instant updates, but I understand they also use REST APIs.

Does anyone have insights into how these bots are architected to provide real-time functionality while still using REST APIs for responses? Is there a mechanism behind the scenes that ensures this instant update behavior? Any explanation would be appreciated!