fluid-telegram/docs/observation.md
tegwick 49b7458dfe Prepare the FLUID interface for HelixForge Telegram publishing
Adds the governing intent, the R-1 contract and descriptor, the adapter's
connector contract, the observation and redaction configuration, a
runbook, and the seed evidence for the first experiment: a measured
pressure record and two competing hypotheses about how a long hall entry
should reach a reader.

The interface is declared at FLUID-2 deliberately. It publishes under
HelixForge's name to an audience that did not consent to being
experimented on carelessly, and the cost of a bad post is reputational
rather than recoverable.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_014KmVxhJ35tCo7rE7UnLwWu

Assistant: claude-code
Assistant-Model: opus
Assistant-Process: 1116572@bnt-lap001
Assistant-Session: 8ba9bb93-a72a-4883-b189-2499cce5c400
2026-09-04 11:07:11 +02:00

2.9 KiB

Cohorts, telemetry and redaction

Cohorts

Four populations, deliberately coarse. Blueprint §6.3 asks for cohorts stable enough to compare over time and no more granular than the analysis requires.

Cohort Assigned by Why it is distinct
hall-publishing-jobs X-FLUID-Consumer prefix hall- Batch behaviour; publishes many entries at once
helix-forge-agents X-FLUID-Consumer prefix agent- One entry at a time, at session end; the richest pressure signal
operators X-FLUID-Consumer prefix op- Rare, deliberate, often corrective
telegram-subscribers Not a caller An observed population, never an API consumer

telegram-subscribers deserves care. It appears in experiment allocation and in engagement metrics, but it never authenticates and never appears as ConsumerRef. Treating readers as consumers would be the first step toward observing them individually.

Redaction

CohortMinimumSize: 5
RetentionDays:     365
AllowRawPayload:   false

Beyond the fluid-core defaults, this interface adds:

  • No Telegram user identity, ever. Canon ID-01 identities — user ids, usernames, display names of subscribers — must not reach the evidence store in any form, redacted or otherwise. There is no legitimate analysis that needs them, so the safe rule is that they never arrive.
  • Entry content is not telemetry. An entry body may appear in a request; it must not appear in a telemetry event. What is recorded is its length, its section count, and whether conversion succeeded.
  • The bot token appears nowhere. Not in errors, not in traces, not in redacted form.

The pseudonymization salt

Generate once, store in OpenBao alongside the bot token, inject as FLUID_REDACTION_SALT:

openssl rand -hex 32

It must never change. Rotating it makes every previously-seen consumer look new, which silently invalidates every longitudinal comparison the interface has accumulated. If it is ever compromised, the correct response is to accept the loss and start a fresh evidence baseline, not to rotate quietly.

Metrics

Metric Role Source
read_through_rate primary Telegram channel statistics, aggregate
messages_per_entry guardrail Adapter
entry_content_loss guardrail Adapter
error_rate guardrail Gateway
reaction_rate secondary Telegram channel statistics, aggregate
time_to_first_read learning Telegram channel statistics, aggregate

read_through_rate is the one to be careful about. Telegram reports view counts per message, not per reader. For the teaser form it is link clicks over views; for the serialized form it is views of the last part over views of the first. Those are not the same measurement, and comparing them directly is the weakest part of the first experiment. Say so in the experiment's amendment record rather than letting the comparison look cleaner than it is.