Site Feed and Your Site Feed
Before diving into this note, try the latest code:
Set up your own Site.
Explore your Site Feed.
Compare it with the seedteamtalks feed.
While doing so, imagine that this feed is customizable — that you can group entries into discussions, apply viewspecs, and define different queries and layouts.
General Principle
General Feeds should be user-generated feeds.
They should be customizable, allowing different views, queries, viewspecs, and formats depending on user needs.
However, we should remember that Sites don’t want to do extra work.
For example, a publisher like The New York Times doesn’t want to:
Fetch or store external content,
Consume bandwidth for others’ data, or
Deal with legal issues for material outside its own Site.
Each Site will only expose or query its own data.
Using Your Own Site to Follow Content Across hyper.media
Users, however, can enhance engagement by running their own Sites (servers) — creating a personalized feed or inbox that crawls mentions and replies across the hyper.media network.
This supports a more sovereign, user-centric model of engagement while respecting Site boundaries.
Building Identity and Linking Keys
A key issue is identity fragmentation.
If users create multiple independent keys without linking them, it becomes difficult for others to follow or mention them. Linking identity keys is essential for discoverability and engagement.
Example:
Eric’s feed shows few mentions because he uses multiple unlinked keys. It will be hard for him to follow active discussions within the Seed Knowledge Community.
Replies and Mentions
We might not currently be following Replies in My Site Feed.
This is a gap — Replies are as important as Mentions for conversation flow and context.
Reads and Unreads: a private .newsrc file
Another open question:
How do we sync read/unread states across different Sites?
For instance, how would gabo.es know that I’ve already read something at nyt.com?
This is reminiscent of the .newsrc files from Usenet — a decentralized way of tracking what each user has already seen, but using a private document!