Follow

Sometimes, Users want to subscribe to each other to see each other's content. The Follow entity facilitates this, by defining a subscription relationship between two users.

Vocabulary

• Follower: The user who is subscribing to another user. If Joe is following Alice, Joe is the follower.
• Followee: The user who is being subscribed to. If Joe is following Alice, Alice is the followee.
• Subscribing: Identical to Following. The act of subscribing to another user's content.

Usage

Consider the following example:

Joe, a user on social.joe.org, wants to follow Alice, a user on alice.dev.

Sending a Follow Request

To establish a follow relationship, social.joe.org can do the following:

1. Create a Follow entity with Joe as the author and Alice as the followee.
2. Send the Follow entity to Alice's inbox.
3. Mark the relationship as "processing" in its database until Alice accepts the follow request.

Accepting the Follow Request

To accept the follow request, Alice can do the following:

1. Create a FollowAccept entity with Alice as the author and Joe as the follower.
2. Send the FollowAccept entity to Joe's inbox.
3. Update the relationship status in its database to "accepted".

Rejecting the Follow Request

To reject the follow request, Alice can do the following:

1. Create a FollowReject entity with Alice as the author and Joe as the follower.
2. Send the FollowReject entity to Joe's inbox.
3. Optionally, log the rejection in its database.

Final Steps

Depending on whether the follow request is accepted or rejected, social.joe.org can then update the relationship status accordingly in its database.

Behaviour

Once a follow relationship is established, the followee's instance should send all new notes from the followee to the follower's inbox.

Entity Definition

{
    "type": "Follow",
    "author": "6e0204a2-746c-4972-8602-c4f37fc63bbe",
    "created_at": "2021-01-01T00:00:00.000Z",
    "followee": "example.com:02e1e3b2-cb1f-4e4a-b82e-98866bee5de7"
}

Graph

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