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Ask HN: Is anyone using MCP notifications?

3 points - yesterday at 3:37 PM


The MCP spec includes server-to-client notifications for things like list-changed events, progress, log messages, but I barely hear anyone talk about them, and I'm not sure how much they're used.

In theory, it would be nice to receive updates from MCP servers ("Your product has been shipped") like we are already receiving from apps installed on the devices.

I'm wondering if this is a useful part of the protocol or just something that will mostly be ignored/deprecated.

  • marcindulak

    yesterday at 8:11 PM

    Some server notifications will be deprecated, once (if?) MCP becomes stateless, see https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/modelcontextprotocol...

      • ilbert

        today at 8:42 AM

        Thanks for sharing this SEP. Yeah some system notifications will go away, but servers will still be able to send custom notifications. Those can be turned into push notification on the device of the user or even actions that the user's device can do programmatically.

          • ilbert

            today at 9:41 AM

            Actually, after reading more carefully, it seems that custom notifications won't be supported anymore in favor of the `subscriptions/listen` RPC endpoint. Maybe the upcoming extensions will make it possible?

    • anitroves

      yesterday at 5:04 PM

      no

      • novellogic

        yesterday at 5:25 PM

        [dead]

        • elenaviter

          yesterday at 9:40 PM

          [flagged]