I don't think you need an activityfeed model. Not yet certainly. But the controller shouldn't be making decisions about what the content of things are. It's just there to direct the flow of traffic, to connect inputs with outputs. To control, as it were. The model should have it because that's the most appropriate place. ActiveRecord decided that the finding and querying logic should be in scopes. It should be a single endpoint to be descriptive and to reduce mental clutter. The answer to this question is this method, not the synthesis of these few methods that I'll have to do myself.