How does Activity work?

Submit Project/News → Activity
When you create a new project, this action (or we can call it activity) is posted to Activity. It is recorded as a Draft and your project is waiting for the Editor to be published. Once it’s published, it’s once again recorded in Activity. Other Members can comment on it, tag other members, etc. Sometime you will also see Updates to articles/projects, these will appear in Activity too.

Actions → Activity
There are many other things we do on CAN that are considered actions. The first one you will ever do is become a Member which is an action recorded by the System in Activity. You may then update your profile, which is also recorded in Activity. You may then add a location, once again recorded in Activity but this time utilising d3.js to show the location on a map. Let’s call these cards. We will build new cards as we go but we have a few already. Similarly, when you sign up to the newsletter this is also recorded in Activity. In other words, your actions on CAN that we would not consider sensitive, e.g. changing a password/name, are recorded in Activity.

Publish → Activity
You can now also publish 500-character entries directly in Activity. You can also include an image, and enable or disable comments. It is a great way to share work in progress, a link, or @mention someone. We have also integrated recent Activity contributors that appear as soon you start typing a @username.

Save → Activity
Whenever you save a project, event, person (People), tool or another member to your Saved it will be recorded in Activity. This is a great way for other members to discover CAN’s archives or other members –– the best way to learn, from each other!

Comment Projects → Activity
When you comment on a project it is recorded in Activity but it is also recorded in that project’s Activity Log. You can find that at the bottom of every article. There is a good example here. They are a little like comments but in fact they are entries in Activity. From here (any post on CAN) you can also add new comments, tag other members @username and your comment will be posted with the project card in Activity.

Daps in Activity
Daps is our answer to ‘likes’ in Activity. Contrary to the attention / visibility metric which only aim is to nudge the content higher, Daps # are semi-private. By keeping this button metric transparent only to the receiver, we create a direct connection—person to person—without any public display or performance. The action becomes a private acknowledgment, a subtle nod of appreciation. Finally, we have also added a dap ratio bar: the metric between the daps you give and those you receive. There’s no guilt, no target. The interpretation of this metric is entirely yours.

Filters in Activity
Use the filters in Activity to filter which type of actions you would like to focus on. You can select more than one and your selection will be remembered so next time you visit you will only see those actions.

Commenting in Activity
Whatever you comment in Activity it will be published in Activity but also visible on your Profile page in the Activity Log. Every member now has an Activity Log at the bottom of their profile page. You can see one here if you scroll to the bottom. It shows all the recent interactions and other Members’ comments, projects or taxonomy. Comments on other members’ comments on projects are treated as comments to the comment and not the project/post. This is an important distinction. A chatter between two members in Activity, regardless of the source of chatter, will not be linked to the source of the chatter, i.e the project or member activity.

Deleting Actions in Activity
This is currently not possible but should there be an action you’d like to remove, let us know and we’ll remove it for you.

Notifications
Whenever someone mentions you in a comment (@username), post or activity, you will see that comment in bold in the sidebar under a new section titled Activity Mentions. You will also see a little dot appear in the top right corner of the website indicating that you have an unread mention. Click on the mention in the sidebar and it will take you to that entry in Activity. It will also mark that mention as read. Email notifications are only sent out if the mention remains unread after a few days. We try to keep these to a minimum by giving you a chance to mark them read yourself before emailing you.

Benefits of Activity over Social Media
The greatest benefit we have is that we are 1600+ members small! We are run by humans for humans! Because of this, we can be free of machinic automation or algorithmic curation. We can avoid attention-at-all-costs dogma of major social platforms and not be polluted by bot-shit, spam ad campaigns, or AI slop. Small allows us to remain connected!

New Entry in Activity

You can now post directly in Activity and your posts can include all kinds of different media as attachments (cards). If you use #channel, your post is automatically added to that channel. If you use @username, then the person you tagged will be notified. You can add p5js live sketches, websites, NFT artifactUri, videos, audio, gifs, etc. Big social platforms are not permitted (URLs to tweets/posts etc), not because we don’t want to, but because they purposely make this very difficult or block.

Supported Media Types

• HTML (URLs/Websites – iFrame and Webview in iOS)
• Video handler (MP4 (H.264, H.265/HEVC), MOV, M4V, M3U8 (HLS streaming), WebM-o-VP8, uses correct ratio.
• Audio handler (mp3, m4a, wav, aac, flac, ogg, opus, autoplay disabled)
• Image handler (gif + image support with correct ratio)
• SVG handler
• Code with line numbers.

Activities and Actions

User-Related Activities

Action	Description	Card	Text
User Registered	When a new user registers.	–	✔︎
User Location Updated	When a user updates their location a card is displayed with the map and longitude/latitude of the city.	✔︎	✔︎
User Website URL Updated	When a user adds/changes/removes their website URL it tries to grab meta image tag, and if it exists, it will display it in a card.	✔︎	✔︎
User Bio Updated	When a user adds/changes/removes their bio, if bio exists it will display it in a card in italics.	✔︎	✔︎
User [X] Updated	Generic user profile field changes (e.g. TwitterX, Instagram, Other, etc.).	✔︎	✔︎
User Name/Email/Password Updated	Not Actioned	–	–

Post-Related Activities

Action	Description	Card	Text
Post Created	New post is created (not yet published).	–	✔︎
Post Published	Post transitions to “publish” status.	✔︎	✔︎
Post Updated	Published post is updated (title/content change).	✔︎	✔︎
Post Deleted	Post is moved to trash.	–	✔︎
Event Created	Name added event	✔︎	✔︎
Event Deleted	Event is moved to trash.	–	✔︎

Content Interaction Activities

Action	Description	Card	Text
Post Saved	User saves a post.	✔︎	✔︎
Event Saved	User saves an event	✔︎	✔︎
Post Unsaved	Not Actioned	–	–
Event Unsaved	Not Actioned	–	–
Clear Saved / Unsaved	Not Actioned	–	–
Comment	User leaves a comment via the popup.	✔︎	✔︎

Member Interaction Activities

Action	Description	Card	Text
Member Saved	User saves another Member	✔︎	✔︎
Member Comment	@notification optional	✔︎	✔︎

Newsletter Activities

Action	Description	Card	Text
Newsletter Subscribed	User subscribes to the newsletter.	–	✔︎
Newsletter Unsubscribed	User unsubscribes from newsletter.	–	✔︎

Taxonomy Term Activities

Action	Description	Card	Text
Term Created	New custom taxonomy term is created in People/Tools.	✔︎	✔︎
Term Description Added	Description was added to a term in People/Tools.	✔︎	✔︎
Term Saved	User saved a term – People or Tools	✔︎	✔︎
Term Comment	User leaves a comment on Term (People/Tools) via the popup.	✔︎	✔︎

Keyboard Navigation

Key	Behaviour
S	Activate keyboard navigation
D	Next Card
A	Previous Card
W	Scroll to top and disable keyboard navigation
ENTER	Go to selected Post

Notes: Keyboard navigation only works when filters are disabled (Show All).