Make Observable more Social: Follow other users/creators

[Daynex]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. I love Observable and the fact that I can create anything from scratch with zero setup is amazing. To me the second best feature of Observable is the ability to share content and to see and learn from others. Unfortunately as of me writing this, there isn't a possibility to follow people. so I need to manually go to my favourite users profile to check if they maybe added new content.

Describe the solution you'd like How to follow:

1. Go to a users profile.
2. Button to follow/unfollow

What following means

1. Get their latest published notebooks onto my feed
2. Notifications (maybe)
3. Anything else?!

Describe alternatives you've considered Not sure if there is a alternative to this.

Additional context

EDITED

1. Fixed some grammar and spelling issues (Sorry, not a native)

[jrus]

Current workaround: use RSS. Some discussion about RSS at talk/4394. Here's a screengrab of my feed reader, where I am currently following 217 Observable authors:

[jrus]

In lieu of waiting for platform changes, I think it should be possible to build a "follow authors" feature inside a notebook (maybe viewed in 'embed' view to take up more of the browser window) that stores a list of the followed authors and occasionally fetches metadata about their notebooks, and presents several panes with a list of authors, list of their notebooks, and a rendered notebook; basically a mini notebook-specific RSS reader. It would take a substantial amount of work to get the details right, but all the pieces are already there.

You can see a list of a particular author's notebooks at @mootari/sortable-notebook-list.

[Daynex]

Hi @jrus!

Thank you for your two suggestions. I really appreciate you taking the time to help me! I especially like the Observable notebook idea by @mootari and will probably go with that for now.

I am curious to hear what the Observable Team thinks about the idea and if they intend to make ObservableHQ even more social or if they maybe have a different strategy in mind 😊😎

[j-f1]

Ooh, interesting! It should also be possible to fork NetNewsWire and have it render notebooks on RSS feeds with notebook URLs

[Daynex]

Hi @j-f1!

NetNewsWire seems like a cool, useful tool. Thanks for sharing!

[jrus]

Ooh, interesting! It should also be possible to fork NetNewsWire and have it render notebooks on RSS feeds with notebook URLs

Let me try to figure out if adding the appropriate notebook-embedding code (e.g. for an iframe version) to the feed will make it show up in a feed reader. See @jrus/feed.

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Okay this works great, try this feed (may be removed at any time, just for testing)
https://endpointservice.web.app/notebooks/@jrus/feedtest2/recent with code from @jrus/feedtest2
first a thumbnail pops up, but if you click it it gets replaced by an embedded notebook.

Unfortunately NNW interprets the javascript as the text content of the article, and uses it as the first sentence in the article list:

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Okay, now serving the script separately.

This feed should work: https://endpointservice.web.app/notebooks/@jrus/feed/recent

[triptych]

Note one thing - following other users is the action someone takes, but the point is that followed users content also shows up in some way in a feed - like on my dashboard. It's about discovery as well as a 'network' - I follow X because they post cool notebooks and I want to be notified / informed when they post a new notebook, or update an existing one.

[mootari]

Solved by the follow feature that was released last month (see release notes).