Follow people and get notified

ARIADNE tells you about two kinds of things: notifications, which are about you (a reply, a mention, a review of your article), and the activity of the people you follow (what they publish, review and comment). Both appear in your inbox and under the bell, on every device you connect your wallet to. Browser notifications can also bring them to you when ARIADNE is not open.

Follow someone

1. Open the person’s profile, for example by clicking their name on an article, a review or a comment.
2. Press Follow. A dialog explains that their publications, co-authorships, reviews and comments will appear in your inbox, on every device you connect this wallet to, and shows the cost.
3. Press Follow in the dialog and sign in your wallet. The button becomes Following.

A follow is a transaction of the ARIADNE contract (follow) that only emits an event: it costs the network fee, about 0.001 ALGO, and no storage deposit (DECISIONS D-109). Because it is on the blockchain, the same list of people you follow works on every device. You cannot follow yourself.

The person you follow gets a notification, “started following you”, but only the first time you follow them: following and unfollowing again never sends it twice.

To unfollow, press Following on their profile (or in your list of follows, below) and sign. Their activity no longer appears in your inbox.

Follows are public

Anyone can see who follows whom: every profile shows its numbers of Followers and Following, and the blockchain keeps every follow. Unfollowing marks the follow inactive; the history stays on the blockchain. See Privacy and permanence.

The inbox

Open the inbox from the bell (Open the inbox), from Inbox in the account menu, or with the Inbox button on your own profile. On TestNet it is https://ariadne.press/testnet/inbox. It has two tabs.

Notifications

Everything that happened to you, newest first, each linking to the comment, the article or the profile concerned:

Notification	When
… replied to your comment on …	someone replied to one of your comments
… mentioned you on …	a comment mentioned you with @name.algo or @ADDRESS (see Comment, mention and vote)
… commented on your article …	someone commented on an article you wrote
… reviewed your article …	someone reviewed an article you wrote
… resolved your comment on …	an author of the article marked your comment resolved
… declared you as co-author of …	someone published an article naming you as co-author (see Co-authors)
… started following you	someone followed you for the first time

The top line counts your notifications and how many are unread. Opening a notification marks it read; Mark all read marks them all. Which notifications you have read is kept in this browser only, for each network and account, so another device starts with them unread.

Following

What the people you follow did, newest first: what they published, articles whose co-authorship they confirmed, and what they reviewed and commented on. Items that are new since your last visit are marked, and the tab’s name says how many are new. The list refreshes every two minutes while the page is open.

At the bottom, You follow N people unfolds the list, with a button to unfollow each one.

Follows kept in the browser

For a short time follows were kept in the browser, before they moved to the blockchain. If this browser still has such a list, the Following tab offers once to Publish those follows on the blockchain (network fees only) or to Forget them.

The bell and the unread count

The bell sits in the top-right corner: on desktops in the bar above the content, on tablets and phones in the top bar next to the wallet (there only with a wallet connected). Its red badge counts your unread notifications plus the new activity of the people you follow. The count refreshes every minute while the page is visible, and when you come back to the page.

Click the bell to open a panel with your latest 8 notifications (unread ones marked). Clicking one marks it read and opens it. The panel also has Mark all read, a line for what is new from the people you follow, Open the inbox and Browser notifications.

The Inbox button on your own profile carries the same count.

Browser notifications

Browser notifications reach you through your browser’s push service, even when the browser is closed, without e-mail and without any outside account (DECISIONS D-124).

Turn them on

1. Connect your wallet and open the inbox, or choose Browser notifications in the bell’s panel.

2. In the Browser notifications panel, press Turn on notifications.

3. Allow notifications when the browser asks.

4. The panel now says “On in this browser for your account. Choose what to receive:”. Tick or untick each kind:

   • Replies to my comments
   • Mentions
   • Reviews of my articles
   • Comments on my articles
   • My comments marked resolved
   • Co-author invitations
   • New followers

5. Press Send a test to check that a notification arrives.

Turn off stops them for this browser. Only the browser where you turned them on receives them; turn them on in each browser you want. One browser can receive them for at most 5 addresses.

Good to know

• iPhone and iPad: notifications work only once ARIADNE is installed on the home screen (Share → Add to Home Screen), on iOS 16.4 or later. Then open it from the home screen and turn them on there.
• Blocked: if notifications from the site are blocked, the panel says so. Allow them in the site settings (the icon left of the address), then reload the page.
• Private windows: there the page runs without its service worker (the part of the app that receives notifications) and cannot receive them.
• Timing: ARIADNE’s server checks for new notifications every 30 seconds and sends each one to the browsers that asked for it. A notification older than a day is not sent.
• Privacy: subscribing needs no signature, because notifications are public data already. The message travels encrypted through your browser’s push service (Google, Mozilla, Microsoft or Apple). ARIADNE’s server keeps only the address you receive for, the kinds you chose and where to send them.

Find articles by the people you follow

In Search, the People filters include Only by people I follow, which keeps the articles written by someone you follow.