Personalized Subscriptions or "Follows" (Lede)

[ostowe]

Description

In its ideal form, this feature would allow users to subscribe to emails containing a post or posts derived from all posts or a specific category, tag, or author. To be more specific, the following options would exist:

• Source
  • All Posts
  • Category or Tag
  • Author
• Type
  • Receive newsletters containing single posts from the selected source
  • Receive a rollup of several posts from the selected source
• Schedule (how often to receive newsletters)
  • Note this option may not be available for the "single post" type listed above, as those would be sent out for every post.
  • Daily
  • Twice a week
  • Weekly
  • Bi-weekly
  • Some other options? Probably would depend on the frequency at which the publisher writes articles.

For end users, this feature might look like two interfaces:

• A "follow" button next to author names or categories/tags
• A section on their account page to subscribe to or unsubscribe from particular feeds

Note as well that the selection of feeds would likely have to be curated, at least initially, as the scale could quickly become untenable if we had a feed for every single tag. This means publishers would select which categories, tags, and authors should have feeds that end users can subscribe to. Authors could possibly be the exception here—all authors could have a feed.

Use Case

An incoming Lede publisher wants this functionality for his users, and it may be useful for other publishers as well. The broader utility is still TBD, and one we'd have to answer before deciding to develop this (unless Alley clients want something like this as well).