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A target defines who should get a notification and how it should be categorized. It typically consists of:
  • Channel: Broad category (e.g., posts)
  • Topic: Subcategory or specific resource (e.g., post_id_123, any, or none)
  • Event: What happened (e.g., new_comment)
Targets are used for both sending notifications and managing recipient preferences.
You can send any target out of the box. Giving a target a project-level preference — cataloging it — is what puts it on your recipients’ settings screen so they can mute it. Once your catalog is stable you can turn on strict targets and an uncataloged target becomes a 400 instead.

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any and none have special meaning:

  • any means all topics under this channel/event.
  • none means only the base channel/event.
  • any is not a valid topic when sending a notification, but both are valid for preferences.
A preference with the target posts:any:new_comment will match a notification with target posts:post_id_123:new_comment, but a preference with the target posts:none:new_comment will only match a notification with target posts:none:new_comment. This applies to strict targets too, which is what makes per-resource targets practical: catalog posts:any:new_comment once and every posts:post_id_123:new_comment you send passes, however many post ids there turn out to be. One entry per post id is never the answer.