[kibwen]

That might be even worse (or just as bad) for users, as now they won't see any updates to the underlying data set even if they want to, and will presumbaly need to perform some explicit action to get a new snapshot.

Personally, if you care about users not missing any item in a query, you just can't use pagination at all, and you have to give them every item in the query in a single huge dump (running the query again would be the "explicit action" mentioned above that gets the user new data). Conversely, if you use pagination, users are free to assume that they might miss some items unless they already expect the underlying data to be immutable.

[donavanm]

Not quite. The API action and the previous responses pagination token is what denotes the consistent list “snapshot.” They get a current view of the datastore every time they start a new paginated API operation, eg without passing an existing token.

Edit: you might think of the list results like a materialized view. It works really well with natural ordering on something like item create time and you can pass that in as a query param.