Notifications
How chat notifications work: when a push is sent, who gets it, what an @mention adds, what happens when the app is already open, and why your dashboard stays quiet.
Basic Messaging only works if people see their messages. Here is exactly when Protocol notifies someone, and the one case where it deliberately does not.
When a push is sent
Every new message sends a push notification to the conversation’s other participants. The sender is never notified of their own message. Tapping the push opens straight to that conversation.
What the push says depends on the kind of conversation:
- In a group, the heading is the group’s name and the body is the sender plus a preview of the message.
- In a one-to-one thread there is no group name to show, so the heading reads New Message and the sender’s name leads the body instead.
- A message with no text of its own, a photo or a voice note, previews as “Sent a message” rather than an empty line. Long messages are trimmed to the first hundred characters.
What an @mention adds
A normal message notifies everyone in the conversation. An @mention sends the person you named a distinct “… mentioned you” notification instead of the generic new-message one, so in a busy group the people who actually need to act stand out. Everyone else in the same conversation still gets the ordinary push. See Formatting & mentions.
When the app is already open
If someone already has that conversation open on a live connection, Protocol does not pile a push on top. The message simply appears in the thread in real time. Pushes are for getting someone’s attention when they are away from the conversation, not for interrupting a live one.
Note that this is per conversation, not per app. Having Protocol open on some other screen does not suppress anything, so a message in a thread you are not looking at still pushes normally.
Your dashboard does not pop anything up
This is the part worth saying plainly, because silence is easy to misread as broken notifications.
On the web dashboard there is no toast and no desktop notification for a new message. Nothing slides in from the corner, nothing appears outside the browser, and your operating system is never asked for notification permission. Push notifications are a mobile mechanism: they go to the Protocol app on a phone, which is where your clients live.
What does change while you are working elsewhere in the dashboard:
- The unread badge on Chat picks up the change, wherever in the dashboard you are. That badge counts conversations waiting on you, not messages: nine unread messages spread across two threads shows 2. It is the number of chats you still have to open.
- The messages panel in the top bar lists those conversations with their own unread counts, so you can see which thread it landed in without leaving the page you are on. Those per-row badges are message counts, which is why they add up to more than the badge above them.
- In chat itself, the conversation moves up the list and gains its green unread count badge.
So the dashboard tells you by changing quietly, not by interrupting. If you need to be pulled out of what you are doing, keep the mobile app installed and signed in on your phone. That is the surface that taps you on the shoulder.
A note on the app icon badge
The number on the mobile app icon is how many conversations are waiting for that person, not how many messages, recalculated with every push. It matches the badge on the web dashboard. On large broadcasts and announcement groups that number is deliberately skipped: working it out separately for every recipient of a roster-wide announcement is a cost nobody gets anything back from. The notification itself still arrives, and the unread badge inside the app is still correct. Only the icon number sits this one out.
Forwarded and media messages notify too. Any new message in the conversation, text, a photo, a voice note, or a forwarded message, triggers the same notification to the other participants.
Getting a message delivered is not the same as getting it read
Notifications get a message delivered. Whether it was actually opened, and whether anyone on your team has picked the thread up, is a separate story with its own page: Who has read a message.
Next: the ticks, the counts and the audit Who has read a message →