Option to set Feed to only show posts from Spaces a user has joined
I've shared this as a feature request, and I'd be curious to know if others agree, but my users (and myself) find it odd that the default Feed page shows all posts from all public Spaces in a community, rather than just the Spaces a user has joined (this is by design as per the Fluent team). While this is useful to show the activity across the community, it's not particularly useful in my opinion for individual users.
For example, in this FluentCommunity website, I haven't joined the FluentCRM Space as I'm not that particularly interested in the product (I have other CRM products in use already), but my Feed shows every single post from this Space even though I haven't expressed a desire to see these posts. I understand the Fluent team wants to encourage discoverability, but as that Space is already a public space that anyone can view all posts without joining, I'd much rather click into that Space when I'm interested in seeing the latest FluentCRM posts. While this is just a single example, I have a community set up with many, many more Spaces where individual users are likely only primarily interested in a couple of them, but might want to peruse the other spaces periodically. This is similar to how every other social media and community app works from my experience.
I'd love to hear your thoughts!
I agree with you.
It would be very convenient to have widgets (like Bettermode does, for example) to build and customize the homepage and improve the user experience.
This way, you could have, for instance, a personalized feed first and then the global feed (if desired).
Linda Rando I would love the ability to build a custom dashboard as the homepage, but I figured that will be easy to do once the Theme Compatibility feature is released so I'm not too worried about that right now (but it's a great idea still!).
Agreed -- feed should be things of your choosing. Showing all posts anyway partly negates the point of joining specific spaces. Perhaps there could be a per-user option to either show or hide all publicly-accessible posts in the feed.
Peter Monk my thoughts exactly and that's what I wrote in a comment on my feature request too. With the feed operating as it currently it, I may as well just join every public space as I'm going to see their posts anyway, and at least then, I don't have the confusion of trying to comment on a post but then realizing I don't have access to that space because I haven't joined it, even though I'm looking at the post in my feed amongst all the other posts I can comment on.
Stuart McKelvie Yep, that's a confusing way for it to operate!
Stuart McKelvie have you checked here - https://fluentcommunity.co/docs/global-activity-feed/
It appears it already does this by default?
Debo Ogunrinde the Fluent team confirmed in this comment that all public spaces are included in the Feed, regardless of whether a user has joined those spaces (that's also my experience in this community too, as I haven't personally joined the FluentCRM space for example, and yet my feed contains those posts). From the doc you linked "The Global Activity Feed in FluentCommunity lets members stay updated and interact with all recent activities across public and joined spaces." That feels counter-productive to me which is where this feature request suggestion comes from - I'm suggesting that this should only include joined spaces.
As humans, we like to complicate the simple of life... hehe
If I want to see only FluentCRM topics, click on FluentCRM space.
But if I want to see only FluentBoards topics, click on FluentBoards space.
We're adults...
The life is simple...
One click... One click...
When I open Facebook's feed, I can see ALL things I like and things I didn't give like... That's the way I discover new things...
Keeping an unified feed, IS GOOD FOR SALES.
People can be exposed to new topics/products I sell on spaces different that they signed up.
But, obviously, it's me...
I may be wrong.
I love to keep things simple.
Jose Luis Duron I would argue my suggestion is simpler - don't show me things in my feed that I'm not expecting haha also, Facebook used to work the way I am suggesting, then it became a social media platform with an algorithm (I'm not building a social media network for discovery, I'm not building a sales platform, I'm building a community for people to discuss their interests)
Your response is perfectly reasonable for a community like this one where there are only a few spaces, but let's imagine for a second that the Fluent team adds a space for all of their products, so now we have 10/15 spaces, but I'm only interested in 2 or 3 of them. Now let's imagine that one of those products releases an update which breaks people's website, so now we have one space with hundreds of angry posts each day. Even though I haven't joined that space, my entire Feed (which is the default homepage by the way) is now full of those posts for a product I'm not interested in, and the posts I am interested in, are lost between these angry posts. Obviously this is an extreme example, but I think you can understand why I've made the feature request I have. I believe the Feed should be a place I can go to browse through updates that are relevant to me. You believe otherwise. I'm suggesting we should at least have a toggle on a settings page for both of us to make that decision for the type of community we're building.
Stuart McKelvie I just want to better understand your use case to see if I can assist or learn from it. In addition to what Jose Luis Duron mentioned, "public" spaces are meant to be viewed by any member. Excluding viewing by any member because they have not joined the space becomes conterproductive. My understanding of what you're wanting to accomplish can be done by setting a space to "private" and that will make the posts from that space excluded from the feed, and only members that joined the space can view from that space in the feed. Remember that only membes of a "public" space can post even though all members can view whether member of that space or not.
Debo Ogunrinde my suggestion is purely focused on the Global Feed. I totally agree that public spaces should be viewable by any member, if they click on that specific space. I don't think the posts from that space should appear in the Global Feed however.
An example from this community: The Say Hello space is public. I've been in this community for a little while now. I'm not particularly interested in reading every one of those posts when I check in to this community - I'd rather go to the Feed page, and look through the latest posts which are relevant to me. However, sometimes I get curious, and I'd like to see who has joined the community lately, so I'll pop over to the Say Hello space and take a quick look. This is just an example, but it's the perfect use case for a public space. A more detailed example of why I am making this suggestion appears here.
Debo Ogunrinde It can be counterproductive or very useful depending on the situation, which is why it’s important to have the option to choose and customize the feed for your community. Each of us knows what works best for our own case and acts accordingly :)
Linda Rando you’re right!
Stuart McKelvie Debo Ogunrinde Just to confirm on this topic between public and private spaces and what one can and cannot see...
How I am understanding it based on this conversation is if say members that are set to public and the space is public then all posts in public spaces are shown in the main public feed by default.
3 questions come up...
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Then for private members that are in private spaces will only see posts in the main feed from private spaces they are in?
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Then what if one is running a freemium membership model where there are free (public) members and paid (private members) how will the feed work then for free and paid members and who sees what?
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And if using Fluent CRM how much more flexibility flexibility does this give based on questions above?
Thanks!
Morgan McArthur 1.- No. Public/Main feed loads everything, always (including messages from public spaces).
2.- Members in private space will see in main feed EVERYTHING. Members not in private space will see ONLY posts from public spaces.
Jose Luis Duron Thanks for stepping in, appreciate the clarification.
- Then for just a space feed when it comes to public and private, same thing? i.e members in private space will see in the space feed everything from public and private, and members not in private space will only see posts from that space public?
- If i decide at some point to run a private space with its own feed, and only allocate members to that space, then only those members get to see what is in the space feed? no other private members part of other spaces will see what is in the private space feed? and main feed?
Morgan McArthur Correct. My suggestion is focused on the Global Feed page which as Jose mentioned above, currently has been designed to display posts from ALL public spaces (regardless of whether the user has joined them), as well as any private spaces the user has joined.
Individual spaces follow the settings of that space (a space cannot have both a public and a private feed - there is only one feed per space and then there is also the Global Feed which is the default homepage of the community). So if it's a private space, only members of that space will be able to see the posts within it (Users of this private space will also see the posts from this private space in the Global Feed page).
I totally agree. It's a huge problem. My site will have many Spaces, each with an Admin. A Space set to 'Public' means that:
- anyone can join immediately, with no vetting, and start posting,
- those posts will show up in the main feed, visible to everyone.
Support verifies that there is no way to disable the Public option for Admins, and no existing way to set the main feed so that viewers see only posts from Spaces they have joined (i.e., are interested in.) However:
"FluentCommunity provides the following action hook that you can use to modify the feed query: do_action_ref_array('fluent_community/feeds_query', [&$feedsQuery, $request->all(), $queryArgs]); You can hook into this to customize the feed query behavior. For example, you could add this to your theme's functions.php or a custom plugin to modify what appears in the feed. You can explore more about FluentCommunity's hook system in the developer documentation: Hooks Overview | Database Models "
WiLson Eberechi to made a plugin for this. The Feed Restrictor addon shows Public posts only to those who have joined that space. Here's a link https://mpaddi.com/space/fcfeedrestrictor/home