Project: Activity Feed

Problem:

People don't know what is new in their network, most importantly including doc updates, group updates, and comments.

Other apps have a "news feed" where users can see all of the new content in a central location. We can do the same to help show users what is going on with all content that has been synced to their computer.

Solution

We will add a new top-level page in the app that will act as the default page, called "Home Feed"

The feed will include an "infinite" list of items that appear as you scroll down.

Like the documents list, there should be a filter that allows you to toggle between content from trusted and all accounts:

Newer items will appear on the top. All of the timestamps shown are the "publish time" (when the write supposedly happened according to the blob), but the feed is ordered by the "sync time" (when the content appeared on your computer)

Feed Item Types

For all of these feed items, the button in the footer will appear when hovering over the feed item. We may also want an options dropdown in the top right of each feed item, but the options are not clear yet and we can add that another time.

New Conversation

API will provide:

Comment ID

Comment Author

Context Document ID

Context Document Version

Document Update (Owner)

API will provide:

Document Owner

Document Version

Document Variant Update

API will provide:

Variant Author ID

Document ID

Version

isNewVariant boolean, or maybe the previous version ID of this author variant (which would be empty for new variants)

Comment Reply

API will provide:

Author ID

Parent Comment Author ID

Parent Comment ID

Comment ID

Group Content Update+Create

The text should say "published ... to" instead of "updated ... in" if the document is new to this group

API Requirements:

Document ID

Group ID

Author ID

Document Version

Previous Document Version (unless first publish)

Pathname

Group Content Removed

API Requirements:

AccountID

GroupID

PathName

Previous Version

Profile Update+Create

The text should change to "created their profile" if this is a new account.

API Requirements:

Account ID

Previous Profile (if existing) - this is useful for showing the old alias at the top of the feed item, to make it clear when users change their name

Changed Profile Fields

Group Info Update+Create

The text should change to "created" if this is a new group.

API Requirements:

Group ID

Previous group info, or version ID for groups.getGroup (undefined if new group) - this is probably not needed, but we need some indication if this is a new group or not

Changed group info fields

API Requirements

The feed will be added as a single new API endpoint like updates.getFeed or something similar

This is neither a "high-level" nor "low-level" API. Some guiding principles:

Enough IDs will be provided so that the front end should only have to make one set of follow-up requests for each feed item. This will keep feed items relatively light while reducing waterfall requests for all relevant information that will be displayed

The feed items will be specific to each entity, as they have different requirements (for example: documents have variants, groups have separate feed items for each item that is changed, etc.)

In cases where no other APIs are available, content will be inlined into the feed items. For example: there is no API for accessing previous profile information

One feed item may be provided from the API that will be used across several different UI feed items (for example: group content removal may be presented by the API as a group content update, same with all document updates+creates) as long as enough information is provided for the appropriate UI to be rendered

UI text is driven by the front-end

Input arguments:

Page Size (optional)

Cursor for pagination, provided by the previous request

TrustedOnly boolean

Output:

Feed item array. Each item needs:

Type Enum

Publish time - when the write (supposedly) happened

Sync time - when the content was received on this computer

See type definitions above

Cursor for pagination, if there are more items.

Scope

1-2 weeks backend

1 week frontend

Rabbit Holes

There may be "duplicate" entries when a document variant is updated and then immediately published to a group. We should make an effort to de-duplicate these, especially when they appear sequentially in the feed. Not clear if the de-duplication should happen in Go or TS

No Goes

Feed filters, aside from trusted/all

Context-specific feeds such as group+document feeds

Feed items for any "deletion" because that is not really supported yet