Creating feeds
Feeds are how your community reads itself: streams of posts gathered around a topic, a hashtag, or a group of people. This guide shows you how to make one and shape what lands in it.
What you'll accomplish
- Create a feed for a topic your community cares about
- Shape what shows up in it with hashtags
- Decide who can see it, and publish it
How long it takes
A couple of minutes per feed. You can tune it whenever you like.
Before you start
- A live community. If you haven't launched, start with Signing up & launching.
- A topic in mind. A feed is most useful when it's about something specific: the community garden, a neighbourhood, a weekly event.
Your feeds
Every community starts with a home stream, and you add feeds alongside it. Each one shows its name, whether it's public, and whether it's active, so you can see your whole lineup at a glance.
Creating and shaping a feed
Create the feed
Give it a name members will recognize, like "Riverhouse conversations." That's enough to start; everything else is tuning.
Shape it with hashtags
A feed gathers posts by hashtag. Set the hashtags to include, and a post carrying any of them shows up in the feed. You can also add tags automatically, exclude ones you don't want, and cap how many a post needs to qualify.
Decide who sees it
Mark the feed public for anyone to read, or keep it to your community. Toggle it active when it's ready; leave it inactive while you're still setting it up.
Watch it fill
Open a feed to see how it's doing: the posts flowing through it, how many members it reaches, and how active it's been lately.
What your members see
Members open your community and find its feeds waiting, each a living stream rather than an empty timeline. New members join your default feeds automatically, so there's always something to read from their first visit (see Inviting your first members).
What's next
- Designing your client — make the space the feeds live in unmistakably yours.
- Moderating your community — keep what flows through your feeds healthy.