platform-tumblr

Conversations (aka Threads)

Limitations

• There is only 1:1 chats in Tumblr
• There is no support for stickers

List Threads

• We get list of threads by making an HTTP GET request to /conversations

List Messages

• We get messages by making an HTTP GET request to /conversations/messages
• We get a list of messages for a thread. But also a token that is used to establish a websocket connection that allows us to listen to new messages in conversations.

Sending a Message

• To send a message we need to make an HTTP POST request to /conversations/messages
• Messages are not sent via websocket

Receiving a Message

• We establish a WebSocket connection at wss://telegraph.srvcs.tumblr.com/socket?token=${token}
• The token comes from the List Messages request. Even though we do get a unique token with each request to list messages, we only need a single websocket connection to listen to updates for all the threads.
• Once the WebSocket connection is established, we need to subscribe to the events for each thread that we are interested in.
• In order to keep the connection alive, we need to dispatch "ping" messages in the WebSocket every 30 seconds.

Message ID

• Messages in Tumblr does not have an ID attached to them. What they hav is a ts property which is a unix timestamp string. We use this property as an ID.

New Messages (Unread Messages)

• The thread/conversation object comes with a lastReadTs property which is a number of seconds since the epoch time. We use it to determine which messages were read/unread.
• There is an endpoint, GET /user/counts, that fetches information about the unread messages counts. We only get the number of unread messages per conversation/thread.
• We keep track of messages that we have already fetched and the count of unread messages. If we detect that the unread count from GET /user/counts is different than what we have locally, we fetch new messages and merge them to local state.