How To - Subscribe

From The Socknet

A user may subscribe to another user's updates without becoming that user's friend, depending on the permission of the subscribee. This is a feature commonly used by public figures.

A subscription is like a one-way friendship. In fact, for simplicity, some providers will treat friendships and subscriptions identically except that no updates should be sent to a subscribee.

RSS Substitution

If the requesting Socknet provider is able to read RSS feeds, it may include the field rss_accepted with a true value.

If the receiving Socknet provider offers RSS feeds, it may respond with an rss field containing a URL to an RSS feed. This reduces some of the effort required by the subscribee but reduces its power to customize data on a per-subscriber basis.

Unsubscribing

When a user wants to end his subscription, the unsubscribe function is called:

POST unsubscribe
{ from: ...,
  to: ...
}

This call indicates that the receiver should no longer send message notifications to the calling user.

Requires to field.

Considerations

Once subscribed, the subscriber sees whatever notification messages the subscribee chooses to send. In the simplest systems these will be the same things that show on the subscribee's public feed.

The Friend List may include the users that the user is subscribed to. It may become prudent to add a field indicating whether the friend is actually a subscribee.