A reader who finds a project worth following needs two things: a place to keep it, and a way to hear what changed. This is that.
Following is private
A follow is a note the reader makes to themselves. It is stored against their account, shown to nobody else, and counted nowhere public — there is no follower count on a card, a project page or an API response. It can never reach a score: a test fails the build if a watchlist is ever read by scoring, ranking or the project cards.
A watchlist holds at most 200 projects. Following requires an account — sign in with GitHub or with a wallet; browsing never does.
What an update is
/updates and the feed read one window — the last 30 days, at most 60 items — over the
change ledger (/api/changes, since 2026-09-26): each update is one canonical ChangeEvent of a
project the reader follows, and its id is the ledger's (ship:<uuid>, state:<projectUuid>:…,
lock:<chainId>:<lockId>:due), never built from a slug.
| Kind | What it means | Where it links |
|---|---|---|
ship |
a ship or a week of code activity | the ship's own public source |
status |
activity status moved (e.g. Quiet → Shipping), from the state-transition record | the project page |
signal |
shipping faster or slower, builder or token verified, liquidity gone, launch graduated | the project page |
contract |
a follow-up contract, an upgrade, a verification or interface change | the explorer |
unlock |
a HoodLock unlock in its last week | the lock's proof |
narrative |
a narrative was assigned from evidence | the narrative |
claim |
a claim was verified | the project page |
One change is one update: a status move used to appear twice, once from the score history
and once from the signal that announced it, and HEY's own bookkeeping (a move to or from
UNKNOWN, a move caused by a scoring-version change) read as change. The ledger records both
and announces neither. A first market reading is context, not a change: the Terminal
watchlist shows it as one line above the list. Opening /updates marks the reader's "seen"
time, so the New markers mean what they say.
Feeds
| Feed | Address | Access |
|---|---|---|
| A reader's watchlist | /feed/watchlist/<token>.xml |
private; the address is the credential |
| Every ship | /feed/ships.xml |
public; items in the order HEY recorded them, guid = the ledger id |
| This week | /feed/this-week.xml |
public |
The private token is 32 random bytes, stored only as a digest, shown once when it is
created, revocable and regenerable from /watchlist. Each item's guid is the change
ledger's id, so a renamed project never shows an item twice. An address that matches no digest is
a plain 404 — never a hint that a token was close. The document is private, max-age=300
and X-Robots-Tag: noindex, and carries nothing about the reader beyond the projects they
follow.
The two public feeds are the alert channel that needs no account at all: a researcher
points their own reader at /feed/ships.xml and sees what shipped, each item linking the
public source HEY recorded it from.
What HEY deliberately does not do
- No unsolicited email. HEY sends five kinds of message, each one the consequence of something the reader did or switched on: your claim is verified (to the builder who started the claim), research finished (to the reader who requested it), the weekly digest (off until you turn it on), alerts (only for an alert rule you set to email, at most one message an hour) and projects you follow, daily (off until you turn it on; nothing on a day nothing changed). Every message says why it arrived and carries a link that stops that kind of message. Nothing is sent to an address its owner has not confirmed by opening the link HEY mails to it, and HEY never mails an address it was not given by its owner. An account signed in with GitHub or with a wallet may add an address; it is used for mail only, never to sign in or recover an account. The settings are the Email section of /watchlist, and /account says where your alerts go.
- No public follower counts. A count of who is watching is market attention, and HEY's market attention comes from market data, not from its own readers.
- No recommendations. The pages say what happened and link to the evidence.