How Presence Works

Presence is the core of ruumy. It’s what makes a room feel alive rather than just a shared document.

What presence includes

When you’re in a room, ruumy tracks and broadcasts:

• Your identity — name and avatar color
• Your cursor position — updated in real time as you move
• Your status — active, idle, or typing
• Your location — which part of the canvas you’re focused on

All of this is visible to every other participant in the room.

How it’s built

ruumy uses Supabase Realtime channels for presence. Every room has a dedicated presence channel. When you join:

1. Your client subscribes to the room’s channel
2. You broadcast a join event with your identity payload
3. The channel aggregates all connected clients and pushes the list to everyone
4. Cursor positions are sent as lightweight broadcast events (no database writes)

This keeps presence fast — cursor updates have a target latency of under 50ms.

Presence states

State	Trigger
Active	Mouse or keyboard activity in the last 30s
Idle	No activity for 30 seconds
Typing	Actively typing in the chat input
Disconnected	Connection lost — shown briefly before removal

Privacy

ruumy does not track presence outside of the room you’re in. When you leave a room, your presence data is immediately removed from the channel. Nothing is stored server-side after you disconnect.