Introduction

A "Channel" can be considered a topic, or a person, community, or any other contextual point that users may wish to rally behind. In general it can be expected that a user could create a Channel to spark discussion around.

For example, if a user is interested in Ancient Greek philosophy, they may start a channel around that topic, and one could expect that all the Posts listed under that Channel would be discussing something related to that topic.

A user may wish to query a list of Channels they have joined or see the name of a channel that a post was created in.

Channels may act as a parent of a Post.

An important attribute of Channels is that their name must be unique from other channels. To maintain unique names across all channels, the contracts maintain a registry of channels. This allows for:

1. Reducing confusion. Users may have difficulty searching for and finding channels that may interest them if Channels cannot have unique names.

2. Improving direct links. Without unique names the url for a Channel would likely need to be an objectId, which is not human friendly.

3. Increasing searchability and sharing. Users can guess at the url to visit a channel or provide human-obvious links to their friends or social channels.

A user must also be able to join a Channel. By joining a Channel, the user will see those Channels in their navigation as well as posts in their feed.