Notifications

Notifications are the last step of triage: once an event routes to queue+notify or ultra, one consumer decides whether it should actually interrupt you right now, and if so, what it should say.

Routing per severity

Only triage decisions at queue+notify or ultra reach the notify consumer at all, page-inbox and plain queue routes never generate a notification. From there, focus filtering applies:

Note

When focus or no-comms mode is active, only ultra notifications pass. Every queue+notify notification is silently dropped at delivery, the task queue card it already filed still exists, you just aren’t interrupted for it.

Toggle focus mode from the “Focus mode, only ultra notifications pass” checkbox on /settings/triage, or programmatically with the ops.modes.set tool. See Not now for the broader interruption-control surface this plugs into.

Disclosure templates

What a notification actually says is controlled per severity level by its disclosure setting (configured alongside the level’s prompt and route at /settings/triage):

Disclosure	Renders as
source-count (default)	"1 important event · mail", the count and the source, no content.
preview (opt-in)	The event’s own text, an actual content preview.

source-count is the safer default: a notification never leaks message content to a lock screen or a notification tray unless you explicitly opted a level into preview.

Delivery providers

Delivery sits behind a small provider interface, deliver(notification), so each surface plugs in its own mechanism without touching the routing or filtering logic above:

Web

The notify consumer writes a toast outbox row; every open browser window subscribed to the toast WebSocket topic renders it as an in-app toast. This is the always-on delivery path, it works with zero OS-level permissions.

Electron (desktop)

The desktop app subscribes to the same toast topic and renders a native OS Notification for each one. Filtering already happened server-side by the time it reaches the desktop client, an ultra notification plays its native sound, everything else arrives silently. Clicking a notification routes you to context relevant to the event.

Expo push (mobile)

Mobile devices register an Expo push token (ops.devices.capabilities.expoPushToken); the notify consumer sends a push payload templated with the level name and the disclosure-rendered body. ultra sets push priority to high and the iOS interruption level to time-sensitive, the one combination that pierces the OS’s own Focus mode on the device, mirroring what focus/no-comms filtering does inside Subspace itself.

Every provider is backed by a fake in tests and under PROVIDERS=fake: nothing leaves the process, sends land on the outbox instead so specs can assert on exactly what would have gone out.

Events & triageHow an event becomes a queue+notify or ultra decision in the first place.

Not nowFocus and no-comms modes, and the rest of Subspace's interruption controls.

Task queueThe card a notified event also files, independent of whether the notification itself was delivered.

MobilePush token registration and the mobile client in general.