Zulip: Add support for unmuting certain topics within a muted stream

[timabbott]

It'd be cool if one could unmute certain topics in a muted stream, basically declaring you want to follow just those topics.

This probably wouldn't be too difficult to implement, since we're doing all the muted stream/topic filtering on the frontend anyway. But it would limit our flexibility for future model changes, so some care is required.

[Katy310]

Hey. I would like to work on this issue. Any pointers or guidelines on how to get started?

[timabbott]

Hi @Katy310! This is likely to be a somewhat involved project that involves a lot of understanding but only ~50 lines of code, but in short I'd start by reading all the code related to muting, and in particular all the code paths using muting.is_topic_muted.

• We'll also want to change the muted_topics data structure to support "anti-muted" topics
• We'll want to make those topics cause them to show in the home view even for a muted stream.
• We may want to have some UI display for this feature.

[gnprice]

This issue has been silent for a while -- so just bumping with the observation that this is one feature I regularly wish I had. :smile:

This also comes up in feedback I hear from other people active in busy Zulip orgs.

(Also I think this issue predates GitHub's emoji-reaction feature! So it has missed out on accumulating :+1: . Just added mine.)

[gnprice]

Adding some context on use case: what I really want this for is the situation where I participate in one conversation on a stream with lots of other conversations I don't have the bandwidth to keep up on in general. Any further discussion on that conversation, I want to learn about in the usual asynchronous way just like the streams I subscribe to.

Some tracker-gardening with cross-references to related issues, since I just did the search to find issues describing this need:

• #6605 ("My Topics", or "Sent messages") is potentially related. But the key thing I want here is to learn about new/unread messages in these topics, which I don't see clearly described in the plan there.
• (OTOH, if an "unmute some topics" feature just automatically took effect for any topic I replied on, that would pretty much nail what I want from it.)
• ~#11042~ #6027 is to get notifications in a topic, which is sort of parallel but much higher-interruption than I want here.
• #3157 and #4271 are different versions of keeping a thread visible to come back to, for I think somewhat different use cases from this one.

[gnprice]

One additional thought on this, inspired by #6605: I'd love for this to happen automatically for any topic I send a message on.

Model-wise, that probably comes in two layers:

• Have a concept of "anti-muted topic" or "subscribed topic" at all (which is what this issue has discussed so far)
• Automatically subscribe to / anti-mute the topic when you send a message

And then #6605 is basically a third layer atop those, asking for a narrow consisting of subscribed topics.