The most basic pattern in social networking is to follow other users. However, many apps will also allow you to follow more complex concepts such as teams, organizations, topics, sites etc.
One of our customers for instance is a soccer related community in Brazil which allows you to follow teams. Another example is is a travel related start up in San Francisco which allows you to follow locations. A more complex example is a job related site where you can follow topics and countries.
When you're using getstream.io you commonly write to the user feed and use the "TO" functionality to write to secondary feeds such as teams, organizations and topics.
Today we're announcing three changes which will make the TO support more powerful:
- When you remove an activity from a user's feed, the feeds which were updated using the TO parameter are also updated.
- When you add an activity via TO this will now trigger a fanout. This means that users which follow the team feed will also see the updates.
- Stream now returns the origin field for activities. This gives you insights into which feeds caused the content to be included in the feed you're retrieving.
These changes make it incredibly easy to support communities with teams, topics, or organizations. Have a look at the documentation for an example.