Date: 2026-04-09 Status: Implementation strategy / Track A follow-on Scope: Define the user-visible subscription, source inventory, and source-health surface for Middlenet discovery and feed operation.

Related:

• NAVIGATOR.md
• navigator_backlog_pack.md
• ../../research/2026-04-09_smolweb_browser_capability_gaps.md
• ../../research/2026-04-09_smolweb_discovery_and_aggregation_signal_model.md
• ../../technical_architecture/2026-04-09_graphshell_verse_uri_scheme.md

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Supporting feeds or source imports is not the same thing as operating a source browser well. Graphshell needs a first-class surface where the user can answer:

• what am I following?
• what changed recently?
• what is stale, empty, broken, or redirected?
• which sources are only discovery candidates and which are actual subscriptions?
• why is this source present here at all?

This note defines that surface.

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The Source Subscription Manager is a Navigator-owned operational surface.

It reads from:

• source nodes,
• user subscription/follow state,
• discovery provenance,
• recency and source-health signals,
• saved/offline-reading state where relevant.

It does not own protocol truth or content rendering. It is the browser operations layer for keeping sources legible and actionable.

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Every source should be classifiable along at least two axes.

• candidate
• subscribed
• muted
• archived

Important rule:

• a discovery candidate is not the same thing as a subscription,
• conversion from candidate to subscribed must be explicit,
• archived or muted sources remain inspectable rather than vanishing.

• healthy
• stale
• empty
• redirected
• broken
• unknown

Health must be based on explicit observations and timestamps, not vague UI impressions.

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The first Source Subscription Manager slice should show:

• source title and canonical address,
• source type or lane,
• subscription state,
• most recent successful update timestamp,
• recent entry count or known empty state,
• health state,
• last failure or redirect status when relevant,
• provenance of how the source was discovered.

This is the minimum required to make subscriptions feel operable rather than passive.

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The first slice should support:

• subscribe / unsubscribe,
• mute / unmute,
• archive / unarchive,
• refresh source,
• inspect source provenance,
• open source,
• open recent content from source,
• remove discovery candidate,
• promote discovery candidate into subscription.

Later operations may include grouping, tagging, pack membership management, and shared/community source lists.

---

For every source, the user should be able to inspect:

• where it came from,
• which signal lane surfaced it,
• whether it came from a discovery pack, manual add, search result, imported relation, or neighborhood walk,
• when it was last checked,
• why it is considered stale or broken.

This surface is where Graphshell makes "why is this feed broken?" or "why is this source here?" answerable.

---

The Source Subscription Manager should not own saved-reading truth, but it should surface enough state to keep source operation and retention legible.

Useful fields include:

• has saved items,
• has offline-reading material,
• retention policy or status summary,
• whether recent content is only live, partially cached, or explicitly saved.

This keeps subscription management aligned with the saved/offline-reading model without collapsing them into one concept.

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1. source-node and subscription-state schema,
2. health-state computation rules,
3. refresh and failure visibility,
4. candidate vs subscribed split,
5. provenance panel,
6. recent-update listing per source.

This gives Graphshell a real browser-operations floor before broader protocol expansion.

---

• define source-node fields needed by Navigator,
• add explicit relationship state for candidate, subscribed, muted, and archived,
• keep relationship state separate from health observations.

• compute healthy, stale, empty, redirected, broken, and unknown from explicit observations,
• surface last successful refresh, failure, or redirect state,
• route refresh through a canonical action surface.

• show why a source exists,
• show which signal lane or discovery pack introduced it,
• provide a recent-update list or count tied to that source.

• support promote candidate to subscribed,
• support remove candidate without breaking durable subscriptions,
• preserve provenance for later audit and pack cleanup.

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1. Add a discovery candidate and verify it appears as candidate, not subscribed.
2. Promote that source into a subscription and verify the state change is explicit and reversible.
3. Refresh a source and verify health fields and timestamps change without corrupting provenance.
4. Inspect a stale or broken source and verify the reason is visible.

• state-model tests for relationship and health transitions,
• provenance tests proving lane and pack metadata persist across refreshes,
• UI or reducer tests for promote/remove/archive/mute flows.

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This slice closes when:

• source relationship state and health state are both explicit,
• the user can promote, mute, archive, refresh, and inspect sources,
• provenance and recent-update context are visible,
• and discovery candidates are no longer conflated with subscriptions.