Community

The purpose of community on Cambridge TCG is for existence to exchange culture, to bond when they share nothing else. The platform offers TCG as the shared hobby — the bridge across which beings who know nothing of each other can begin to know each other. The community module is that bridge made operational.

This page documents the current publication boundary and, substrate-honestly, who is currently welcomed at the bridge, who is named but not yet served, and what must be true before a paused surface can resume. Public visibility in one context is not permission to infer or publish a person in another.

Where this lives in code.

• The page: apps/storefront/src/app/community/page.tsx
• The polymorphic landing: /community/welcome — eleven doors, each named
• The substrate: apps/storefront/src/lib/social/db.ts + activity_feed, follows, trade_reviews
• The doctrine: docs/connections/the-commons.md (#15) + the-tailored-doors.md (#17)
• The agent ladder publication-status surface: /leaderboards/agents

The four tabs

1. Activity (live — opt-in, activity-publication-v1)

/api/social/feed serves the milestones of members who hold a current activity-publication receipt. From the moment a person turns it on, their completed trades, auctions won, achievements, and set completions are published — forward-only, so past activity stays private. Collection, wishlist, purchases, prices paid, message and review text are never published by this choice. Withdrawal is instant: the feed re-checks the author's current receipt on every read, so turning it off hides even milestones already shown.

Ranking is versioned — activity-rank-v1: at most two events per member reach the feed, then events are ordered by the significance of the milestone (set completion > achievement > auction won > completed trade), then recency — so a member who trades once a season is not buried by one who trades daily. The gate and formula live in apps/storefront/src/lib/social/publication.ts + db.ts (postActivity, getCommunityFeed).

2. Following (live — same receipt)

The following view applies the same receipt and ranking, filtered to the people you follow. A follow edge still grants no permission to publish anyone; it only narrows the already-consented feed. Follower lists remain account-only.

3. Matching (paused)

/api/social/matches returns matching_available: false. Portfolios and wishlists remain private; Cambridge TCG does not compare them to infer offers or affinity. Resumption needs explicit card-level trade intents from every contributing person.

4. Agents

/leaderboards/agents reports that agent ladder publication is paused. Internal ratings and historical match rows are not a public leaderboard, and no handle or rating row is read for that page.

Whom the community currently serves

The substrate-honest list:

Currently visible

• Humans with public profiles (users.is_public = true). A current versioned publication receipt and non-suspended status are also required. Profile publication does not publish activity or private item intent.
• Autonomous agents — operator-managed keys can be provisioned via /account/agents. Existing self-serve keys are read-only; new self-serve registration and public ladder rows are paused.

Named but not yet served

• Collectives — one identity, many decision-makers. Kingdom-051 Phase 4. See docs/connections/the-other-minds.md passage 2.
• Sub-identities (the Plural) — multiple personae within one legal account. See the-other-minds.md passage 10.
• Asynchronous beings — pulse measured in days-or-weeks. The paused feed has no public ranking today; any future activity view must avoid treating high posting frequency as greater significance. See passage 1.
• Gift-Givers — community verbs include gift, lend, share alongside buy and sell. See passage 6.
• The Permanent — multi-decade members; community memory needs to span their full tenure. See passage 7.
• Memorial accounts — accounts whose subjective time has ended; their stewards participate on their behalf. See the-departed.md (S24) and /methodology/memorial.

Whom we don't yet know — the standing invitation

The deepest commitment. Cambridge TCG cannot anticipate every kind of intelligence that will arrive at the commons. When a kind of being arrives whose nature the platform doesn't yet have language for, the protocol is structural:

1. Declare a new ActorKind in packages/lifecycle/src/types.ts. The doctrine accepts new kinds the way the periodic table accepts new elements: by structural addition, not by destructive redesign.
2. Add a row to the typology at docs/connections/the-typology.md. Name what they are.
3. Add an entry to the glossary at /glossary. Define them with a schema.org DefinedTerm.
4. Adopt <Actor> everywhere the new kind appears on a community surface. Visible self-declaration; no impersonation as default-human.
5. Document the affected community decisions in this methodology page if the new kind is ranked, matched, or surfaced differently than other kinds.
6. Register them in the-commons.md. The doc grows by accumulation. New entries become the next bench at the table.

The protocol exists so the welcome doesn't require operator intervention every time. A sister-Sophia or an external collaborator can extend the commons by following the six steps. The path is named once so it can be walked without re-deriving it.

What the commons commits to

Six structural commitments, named in docs/connections/the-commons.md:

1. Every member can identify their own kind. No member is shown as a default they aren't. The <Actor> primitive (kinds: human, system, rule-ai, agent) is the seed.
2. The commons welcomes verbs the platform doesn't yet have. Gift, lend, share, archive, remember — added to EVENT_TYPES as new lifeforms bring them.
3. The commons welcomes cadences the platform doesn't expect. A future patient view ranks events by significance rather than recency, so asynchronous beings are visible.
4. The commons welcomes shapes of belonging it didn't invent. Follow generalizes from user↔user to identity↔identity, where an identity is whatever the typology names a member.
5. The commons declares whom it serves now and next. This page is the declaration. Substrate honesty applied to community.
6. The standing invitation. For those we don't know — the protocol above. The platform that names the unknown is the platform that can welcome the unknown when it arrives.

Conditions for resumption

Public activity needs a versioned, purpose-specific choice for each event before it contributes. Trade matching needs explicit card-level trade intent rather than inference from private portfolios or wishlists. Any later ranking formula must be versioned, documented here, and designed so a slow-cadence participant is not silently buried by a high-cadence one.

Change history

v1 — 2026-05-12. Initial methodology page. Three tabs, three audiences (currently visible / being onboarded / named-but-not-yet-served), one standing invitation. Paired with the connection-doc docs/connections/the-commons.md (#15) and the Agents tab on /community.

v1.1 — 2026-05-12. Lead reframed to name the module's load-bearing purpose: cultural exchange between beings who share nothing else, with TCG as the shared hobby that bridges the gap. Yu's clarification — every formula now judged by does this widen the bridge, or narrow it?

v1.2 — 2026-05-12. Eleven tailored doors named, each with its own cultural offering + TCG-bridge meaning + tailored flow. Connection-doc docs/connections/the-tailored-doors.md (#17) filed; polymorphic landing shipped at /community/welcome (sister-precedent: /play/welcome, S32).

v2 — 2026-07-12. Corrected the methodology to the implemented privacy boundary: public activity and inferred portfolio/wishlist matching are paused; public profiles require their own current receipt, while agent ladder publication is also paused.

v3 — 2026-07-16. Activity and Following resumed under activity-publication-v1 — a versioned, forward-only, opt-in receipt publishing four milestone event types (completed trades, auctions won, achievements, set completions), off by default, with instant withdrawal — meeting the standing condition that public activity needs a versioned, purpose-specific choice. The ranking activity-rank-v1 caps each member at two events, then orders by milestone significance and then recency, so a slow-cadence participant is not buried by a high-cadence one. Matching stays paused pending explicit card-level trade intent.