The notification icon (the bell) isn’t showing notifications are waiting unless the screen is refreshed. It would be nice if it were more actively checking notification status.

Might need websockets for this?

Could it be done with htmx? hx-trigger can be set to fire at fixed intervals (docs, see Polling).

Some sort of server-side-event might work. Just to turn the bell icon on. https://htmx.org/extensions/sse/

That would be simple to code but very bad for scalability. Each user would constantly be keeping a connection open, tying up a thread on the server. Just a few dozen concurrent users would bring a server to it's knees.

WSGI (flask) isn't great at coping with lots of simultaneous open connections so we might need to make a separate mini-project using a different framework/stack/language. This would involve a significant increase in dependencies and more complexity for deployment so we'd have to really really want to do it.

Personally it seems like this feature was added to mainstream social media purely to increase addiction and farm engagement so I'm pretty lukewarm about that and don't feel the lack of it in PieFed. Getting away from that crap is kinda the whole point of the fediverse, to me.

Yep that looks excellent for frontend. How we handle it on the server side is the big scary unknown part to me.

I guess it's the content of the notifications rather than the timing of their delivery is what makes them a dark pattern so perhaps I need to chill out about that.

This looks promising https://flask-sse.readthedocs.io/en/latest/quickstart.html