Difference between a feed and an activity

Question

I am a novice and I am trying to implement getstream io in one of my project. I understand the concept of feed groups such as Flat feed, Aggregated feed etc. But I am finding it difficult to understand what a feed and an activity are. The docs does not explain the concept to a novice and I tried googling it but found none. Any ideas guys?

Answer 1

Getstream IO terminology:

Activity

Activities tell the story of a person performing an action , every activity consists of an actor (the user undertaking the action), an object (the subject of this activity, eg a tweet), verb (the type of action that was undertaken, eg 'tweet'). One activity is added to a feed, and all the feeds following this feed receive the activity.

Feed

A feed is a list of activities ordered by the time they were created, these can either be activities that were added directly to this feed, or added to any of the feeds this feed follows.

In most applications a user will have a feed on which he adds activities. And another feed for consuming activities of users he follows. The documentation explains this as follows:

We recommend that you create different feed groups for adding activities, and for consuming activities.

Feed Group

To separate these consumer and producer feeds you can group feeds together. For instance, all producer feeds can be contained under the feed group 'user'. And all the feeds used for consumption are contained under the feed group 'timeline'. So a feed group contains many feeds.

Feed Types

A feed group has a feed type that determines how the feeds inside this feed group behave. The default type is flat , these feeds are the only feeds that can be followed and are useful as producer feeds (our 'user' feed example). Aggregated feeds can be used to consume activities in an "aggregated" manner, this means you can define certain rules to group together multiple activities (for instance activities with the same verb). The last feed type is the notification feed which is an aggregated feed with some additional functionality to mark activities as seen and read.

get started With this information in mind try out our get started tutorial to get a better feeling for how the API works.