- Community
Every people in the catalog has its own message board. On June 15 those boards became something you can follow. One tap on a group's page subscribes you, and a new thread on that board raises an alert in your notification bell. Your dashboard gains a feed called From boards you follow, with the latest threads across every board you track.
On June 16 notifications became links. Each one resolves to its board's page and opens straight at the conversation, and the site's daily discussion question now alerts a board's followers as well.
That daily question started on June 12. Each day the site posts one open question on the board of the group featured least recently, so the rotation walks the whole catalog and every board gets its turn.
Under the hood
- Follows are stored per reader and per board against the group's numeric catalog ID, the same identifier board messages carry.
- The follow button arrives with its state and follower count already in the page, then updates optimistically on tap. The follow endpoint is idempotent, so repeated taps settle to one follow.
- A new top-level thread fans out one notification to every follower of that board, while replies keep notifying the author of the parent post. The fan-out runs as its own step, independent of the post itself.
- Each notification resolves its message to the board's canonical page and deep-links to the conversation anchor. An empty feed points readers to the world atlas and the community boards.
- The daily question walks a rotation cursor: it picks the group featured least recently, posts at most one site question per board, then advances the cursor. Wording comes from eight open-ended templates, chosen deterministically from the group's ID so each board's question stays stable.
- open-ended question templates
- 8
Peoples in this entry
See it on the site
Related build notes
- Mar 9, 2026A community on every people's pageTen days in March made the atlas a conversation: boards on every people's page, public profiles, threaded replies, likes, notifications and one feed.
- May 14, 2026Every group gets a gallery, and the community picks the coverPortraits became galleries. Members vote on every image and flag the ones that miss, and the top-rated portrait becomes each group's cover.
- Aug 5, 2026One tap under every portrait asks: does this look right?The Verdict Strip puts one question under each portrait, needs no account, and hands every reader the next face nobody has judged.