The directory was filtering out the demo persona on the rationale
that "the demo bot is not a real user and should not appear in real
discovery." That's exactly backwards — the whole point of having a
demo persona is to give new users a follow target so the platform
doesn't feel empty when they arrive. Hiding the bot from the
discovery surface defeats its purpose.
Concretely on flagship: only one local user (ullrich) was visible
on /explore today, even though Bruno (the demo persona) is
public-by-default and posting public activities. After this change
both appear; Bruno carries a small "🐕 Demo account" badge next to
his display name so viewers know what they're following.
- apps/journal/app/lib/explore.server.ts — drop the
ne(users.username, persona.username) clause from exclusionFilters.
The demo persona is now treated like any other public user. Banned/
suspended scaffolding stays for forward-compat.
- apps/journal/app/routes/explore.tsx — loader computes isDemoUser
per row (cheap, just username comparison against
loadPersona().username). DirectoryRow renders the demo badge inline
with the display name, matching the existing pattern on
/users/:username.
- openspec/specs/explore/spec.md — updated the "Excluded users"
requirement to remove the demo persona, replaced the "demo
excluded" scenario with "demo appears with badge", and updated
the "Active recently" requirement + scenarios accordingly.
- apps/journal/app/lib/explore.integration.test.ts — flipped the
demo-persona test from "is excluded" to "is included".
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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