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Channels
In Flurfunk, users don’t follow each other, they read channels. Everyone receives all messages - there is no way of sending something only to a specific group of users. However, users can decide what they want to read, and how important that kind of information is to them.
Every message can appear on multiple channels, just like a TV program can be broadcast across multiple channels at the same time. This can be used to categorise messages, e.g. send all SCM mails and monitoring reports to the infrastructure channel. All user messages are automatically sent to the users channel, but since you can post to multiple channels, you can make a server reboot notice appear in the infrastructure channel as well.
Flurfunk channels can also be used to implement something similar to IRC channels, but their flexibility makes it possible to use them as the building blocks for various use cases without requiring new server/client features.
If you have a colleague that is interested in what everyone says on Flurfunk, but couldn’t care less about all these infrastructure messages, he can tell his client to mark the channel as unimportant or hide it completely.
It’s up to the client what the user can do with channels: The most basic functionality would be to hide some channels, but more sophisticated clients can make it possible to prioritise channels and visualise them differently (e.g. small, grey font for unimportant messages, a large black font for important ones), assign colors to individual channels etc.
If you’re using Flurfunk in a larger team with several departments, you might want to create a channel for each department, and have everyone post all their messages to their respective department group (their clients should allow them to do that). That way, there isn’t too much noise but you can still look at what other departments are doing, and of course read relevant global messages.
Channels could also be used for conversations between users, but this is not implemented yet. If you post a message to the @Felix channel, my client would inform me that someone has directed a message specifically at me. Since every message can have multiple channels, you could add multiple @ channels if you want to write something to several people. These @ channels are a bit special: They wouldn't show up in channel lists, so you cannot mark messages to specific users (other than yourself) as unimportant or hide them. But your client should have a feature to mark messages to other people in general as unimportant, or hide them.