Following & the Social Graph¶
Follow people, not URLs. Since v2.36.0-beta.31, Following is a real social graph: follow any public Glassy window by slug, see who follows your windows, and keep external RSS feeds in their own Publications tab.
What Following does¶
- Follow by slug — follow a Glassy identity on the instance where you are signed in. The graph keys on that identity rather than the feed URL, avoiding duplicates caused by alternate hostnames. This is not a federated graph: following identities across separate instances is not implemented.
- Follower counts — each public window shows how many Glassy users follow it.
- Notifications — a new follower delivers a notification to the followed account.
- People-first surface — the Following view lists people first; external RSS feeds live in a separate Publications tab.
- Discovery strip — an opt-in "Glassy people" strip suggests public windows to follow.
- No quota cost — following a Glassy person no longer consumes the free-tier RSS publication quota (that quota applies to external feeds only).
Collaborating on a note, and removing it¶
Notes can be shared with collaborators. What Delete does depends on which side of that share you are on, and since v2.36.0-beta.41 it does the thing you meant in one action:
| You are… | Delete does | Can you undo it? |
|---|---|---|
| The owner | Moves the note to your bin (soft delete) | Yes — restore from the bin |
| A collaborator | Removes your access — an unfollow. The owner's note is untouched | Re-accept the share |
| Neither | Refused with 403 Only the note owner can delete this note |
— |
A collaborator's delete used to return a 403 telling you to call a different
endpoint, which made one intention — "get rid of this note" — take two actions
across two screens. It now just removes the note from your workspace.
Restoring is owner-only
Only the note's owner can restore it from the bin, and an attempt by anyone
else returns a real 403 rather than a success message that quietly did
nothing. Deleting is idempotent: asking twice, or an agent retrying after a
timeout, succeeds without moving the original bin timestamp.
Privacy on private instances¶
On a private or members-only instance, follower counts are protected:
anonymous callers get 401 PRIVATE_INSTANCE before any slug lookup, so
nobody can enumerate the windows of a members-only instance by probing counts.
Self-hosted appliances¶
The graph works on appliances, with two honest caveats:
- A single-user appliance has no other local identities to follow.
- To follow people hosted on the cloud instance, sign in to that cloud instance; an appliance's local follow graph does not federate with it.
Publications (external RSS)¶
External RSS feeds remain a first-class part of the Following surface, in their own tab. Free-tier accounts can follow up to 10 external publications; Pro and Clear members are unlimited; self-hosted appliances are unlimited (local feeds cost nothing).