Every object (Page, Community, User) on WeWrite should feel alive.

Recent changes should be obvious. The "pulse" or "breath" of a page should immediately identifiable. Activity feeds will bubble up changes across many different objects.

Perhaps this can be achieved with a sparkline of recent changes (a small line graph) or something I'm calling "activity beads" (unintentional rhyme with activity feeds)

Quickly scrubbing through recent changes using the filmstrip UI will also let users see the evolution of a page over time. 

Death

The death of an object should also be obvious. Has this page not been worked on in ages? This should be immediately known.

Perhaps the page had a heroic death. It’s enshrined and embalmed for posterity. Perhaps a Community decided it was finished, it shouldn't be changed, should be locked down and written in stone. 

Perhaps the page was neglected, abandoned, forgotten. 

These should somehow be obvious. 

Sketch of what a page's activity section could look like underneath a page. Blue particle generator could be used to make the nearest point of the graph "sparkle" and feel alive

Vitality statistics

For all pages, including User and Community objects:

• Donations over time

• Changes to the page over time

• Views, time spent on page

Additional fields only User and Community objects:

• Pages created over time

Different Abstraction Layers - Object and Objects

A Page is a single thing, whereas Users and a Communities are both collections of things; User is a collection of Pages (owned by the User) and a Community is a collection of Users and Pages.

Thus, the way of visualizing each object's "aliveness" might be slightly different. 

See also

• Against Posts - the act of "posting" something is the immediate death of the thing. The act of writing for posts is to carry out a living process in order to immediately kill the thing. Writing must instead be alive and constantly tinkered with, it must be nurtured and grown. Don't say Goodbye, say See You Later.

• GitHub repos offer a pulse. They either feel alive or dead. Articles do not have a pulse, they always feel dead.

• On Substack, when a user changes their article, it sends ANOTHER EMAIL (disgusting!) and it doesn't even show changes, or a diff view. Embarrassing!