What's the Difference Between Feeds and Feed Groups?

When instantiating a new feed, two arguments will be required: the feed group and the feed ID. Consider the code below where ‘timeline’ is the feed group and ‘jack’ is the feed ID.

const jack = client.feed(‘timeline’, ‘jack’);

A feed group, put simply, is a set of rules / permissions that feeds instantiated with must follow. In the example above, ‘jack’ is the specific feed while ‘timeline’ is the governance in which ‘jack’ abides. In this way, a comparable example (although, not quite the same) is the difference between a class and an object where an object is an instance of a class.

To further drive this principle home, imagine that you have created a feed like so:

const public = client.feed(‘timeline’, ‘public’);

The intention being that any user can read AND write to this particular feed. Our default permissions will prevent this from happening, however, you can reach out to our customer success team to apply these special permissions. In this way, the global read / write permissions will not be applied to the ‘public’ feed but rather the ‘timeline’ feed group, which in turn, will apply these same permissions to each feed instantiated with the ‘timeline’ feed group.