🚀 Live feed is here — new posts delivered in real time | 4/15

Hey Pickful community,

Starting today, your home feed is alive. When someone publishes a new post while you’re browsing, you’ll know right away.

⚡ What it looks like

Across all three home tabs — Explore, Latest, and Following — a purple pill appears at the top of your feed whenever new posts land:

“↑ New posts 3”

The count ticks up in real time. Tap it, and the posts slide into the top of your list — no reload, no flash, no scroll-position lost.

🔍 Why we built it

We moved the home feed behind Cloudflare’s CDN cache a while back. That made first paint fast, but it also meant content could be up to 20 minutes stale. The only way to catch up was to pull-to-refresh manually.

Now we have both:

The cache handles speed. The push handles freshness. No trade-off.

⚙️ How it works

Under the hood we use Action Cable (WebSocket) for live broadcasting:

• Explore / Latest: every new post triggers a lightweight broadcast (just the post ID — a few dozen bytes) to all connected users.
• Following: broadcasts only go to the author’s followers, so you’re never notified about posts from people you don’t follow.
• Tap to load: the full content is fetched only when you tap the banner, personalized to your tab’s filters.

The count you see is accurate — no noise from blocked users, no missed posts from people you follow.

🔧 Other improvements

• Parallelized test suite: we introduced parallel_tests — 2,026 test cases now finish in 24 seconds on a 12-core machine, which means faster iteration and more confidence in every release.
• Source URL validation fix: editing a post used to re-validate the source link even when you didn’t change it, sometimes blocking the save. Now validation only fires when the source field is actually modified.

💬 To the community

The idea is simple: you shouldn’t have to refresh your feed to know something new happened. A community is alive — the feed should be too.

This is live across Web, iOS, and Android — no app update needed.

If you notice delays, wrong counts, or anything off, let us know.

Pickful team
April 15, 2026