May 2025 Summaries

This is a tutorial on building a real-time chat application using Next.js and deploying it to Netlify, with the help of Ably for real-time functionality. The tutorial covers creating a new Next.js application, setting up dependencies, authenticating an Ably client, building the components, hosting on Netlify, and making the app more interactive by adding features such as message history, room reactions, and typing indicators.

Ably has released its Moderation for Ably Chat feature, which provides a flexible and powerful way to filter inappropriate content and protect users in real-time. The moderation engine is available in two modes: before-publish and after-publish, allowing developers to choose the approach that best suits their needs. The feature integrates with Hive, a leading moderation provider specializing in AI-based content review, offering two options: Hive model-only (before publish) and Hive Dashboard (after publish). For teams that want full control or need to integrate with a moderation provider not natively supported, Ably also supports custom moderation using AWS Lambda. Moderation is fully integrated into the Ably dashboard and pipeline, allowing developers to apply rules, control retry policies, track errors, and combine automation with human review for nuanced control. The feature is now available in Ably Chat, enabling developers to keep their rooms safer without slowing down their app.

Ably has launched LiveObjects, a serverless, durable, and scalable way to create, update, and synchronize shared state across large numbers of connected clients in real-time. This provides a global, conflict-free shared data layer that removes the burden of building or managing complex infrastructure for low-latency updates and synchronization. LiveObjects enables applications to work with live, shared data that synchronizes instantly for users everywhere, making it suitable for various use cases such as voting features, collaborative applications, multiplayer game state, and shared configuration settings. The technology provides a simple, purpose-built API that handles real-time synchronization, persistence, and convergence behind the scenes, ensuring a single logical view of data distributed to the edge, updated in real time, and always in sync.

Ably is introducing ephemeral messages to let developers deliver transient updates in real-time apps without polluting the system with unnecessary data. Ephemeral messages are only delivered to currently-connected clients and do not appear in message history, rewind buffers, or integrations like webhooks or queues, making them ideal for sending reactions, typing indicators, or cursor positions. By marking a message as ephemeral, developers can exempt it from storage, message history, and billing implications, saving on costs of retrieving messages from history. Ephemeral messages are available now in Ably Pub/Sub, and developers can quickly get started by following the provided documentation.