trails/openspec/changes/archive/2026-04-25-social-feed/proposal.md

Why

trails.cool has public activities and public profiles, but no way for users to build a network. A signed-in user's home today shows only their own activities; the visitor-facing home shows every instance's public activity indiscriminately. There's no "activities from people I care about" view, which is table stakes for a social outdoor journal and the differentiator that gives users a reason to sign up over just using the Planner.

This change ships the local social layer: follows between users on the same Journal instance and a personal /feed aggregating their public activities. ActivityPub federation (cross-instance follows, inbox/outbox dispatch, Fedify integration) is deliberately deferred to a follow-up change social-federation so this lands in days rather than weeks. The schema is forward-compatible: when federation arrives, remote follows slot in without migration.

What Changes

• Add an explicit users.profile_visibility setting ('public' | 'private'). New accounts default to 'private' (matches trails.cool's privacy-first content defaults); existing accounts are backfilled to 'public' so deploy doesn't lock anyone down. private is functionally Mastodon's "locked" account: profile renders a stub with a Request-to-follow button for non-followers; only accepted followers see content; follows land Pending until the owner approves.
• Users SHALL be able to follow another local user (same instance) by clicking a Follow / Request-to-follow button on the user's profile page. Public targets auto-accept; private targets create a Pending row that the owner approves or rejects from /follows/requests.
• A signed-in user SHALL have a /follows/requests page listing all incoming Pending requests with Approve / Reject actions; the navbar shows a count badge linking to that page.
• A signed-in user SHALL be able to view a social feed of public activities from the users they follow with an accepted relation, reverse-chronological, at a dedicated /feed route linked from the nav.
• The logged-in home (/) SHALL link prominently to the new social feed; personal dashboard content stays as-is for now.
• Profile pages SHALL show follower and following counts (accepted-only) and a context-aware Follow control (Follow / Request to follow / Requested / Unfollow).
• Privacy: follower/following counts and lists are public per instance. Only public activities appear in the feed; pending follows don't contribute content.
• Privacy manifest: documents the new follows relation as data the instance retains about who follows whom.
• Forward-compatible schema: follows is keyed by an actor_iri TEXT column even though all rows are local now (local user IRIs look like https://{DOMAIN}/users/{username}). When social-federation lands, remote IRIs go in the same column with no migration.
• Out of scope (tracked as follow-ups):
  • ActivityPub federation primitives — social-federation. Goal there is "Mastodon can follow a trails account" inbound and "trails can follow other trails instances" outbound.
  • A unified notification UI. The follow-request count badge is a one-off; broader notifications (e.g., "your follow request was approved", "new public activity from people you follow") will be designed in a follow-up.

Capabilities

New Capabilities

• social-follows: the follow/unfollow graph (local now, federated later) and the aggregated social activity feed surfaced at /feed.

Modified Capabilities

• public-profiles: add a profile_visibility setting on users, gate /users/:username on it, and add Follow / Unfollow button + follower and following counts to the profile page.
• journal-landing: add a prominent link from the signed-in home to the new /feed route; personal dashboard content stays.

Impact

• Code: new follows table (Drizzle + migration), new users.profile_visibility column. Queries for follower/following lists, aggregated feed query, new routes (/feed, /users/:username/followers, /users/:username/following), profile-visibility setting in account settings.
• API: new endpoints POST /api/users/:username/follow, POST /api/users/:username/unfollow; existing public-profile and feed endpoints gain follower/following counts.
• UI: Follow button + counts on /users/:username; new /feed route with card list (reuses the home-feed card component); nav item "Feed" visible to signed-in users; profile-visibility toggle in /settings/profile.
• Federation: deferred to social-federation. The schema's IRI key + users.profile_visibility are placed now so the federation change is additive (no schema rewrite).
• Dependencies: none new; drizzle-kit push handles the schema migration.
• Privacy manifest: new entry documenting the follows relation (which user follows whom on this instance, when).
• Operational: the social feed query joins follows with activities; the existing index on activities(created_at) plus a new (follower_id, created_at DESC) on follows keeps the join cheap to thousands of follows per user.