Community
Community is where you talk to people on the hub. You can start a discussion that anyone can read and reply to, join a community that has grown up around a product, send someone a direct message, and get a notification when something happens that concerns you. Reactions, polls and bookmarks work on any of it, and on your own documents too.
Discussions and notifications are part of every workspace. Communities belong to a product, and messaging is switched on for a product's users or for a workspace.
Topics
- Discussions: public threads, with topics, replies and categories.
- Communities: a group of people around a product, with threads of their own.
- Messaging: direct messages between people.
- Notifications: what tells you something happened, and platform-wide announcements.
- Reactions, polls and bookmarks: a quick reply, a vote, and a way to keep a thing for later.
- Social: friends, follows, blocks and presence.
Everything you do in Community on the site, a program can do over the API: start and reply to discussions, join communities, send and receive messages, list and stream notifications, react, vote and bookmark, and manage friends, follows and blocks.
Discussions are the discussion routes, written by hand. The signed-in routes create a topic, reply, bookmark and react. The public discussion routes are the read-only public side. Communities are the communities routes.
Messaging is the chat routes. One call opens and lists conversations. Two more stream them: a single conversation, or all of yours. The streams are server-sent events: a message is written to the database, then a database notification wakes every open stream.
Notifications are the notifications routes. One lists yours and one is the live stream. Another holds your preferences. The stream wakes on the user notification channel.
Reactions, poll votes and bookmarks are the content routes for each.
Social is the friends, follows and blocks routes, and presence is the presence route.
Over MCP, the discussions tool group lets an agent search threads, list categories, read your bookmarks and read your recent notifications.
The full list of routes, with each one's parameters, body and responses, is the REST reference on the help site. The tools an agent gets are listed in the MCP reference.
A post is a markdown document. Discussion bodies are kept with every other markdown document, so search, versions, reactions and bookmarks are the same code everywhere.
Live feeds are server-sent events woken by the database. One hub holds one dedicated listening connection per process, and every stream subscribes to it. There is no socket server to scale separately.
Messaging is a flag, not a table. Turning messaging on for an ecosystem is one flag read by the route guard, which is the same mechanism a product uses for its own flags.