The feed is the screen people you know opens on. This page says what is in it, what takes a post out of it, why it ends, and what the app does and does not do beside it. Most of what follows is the opposite of how a feed usually behaves, so it is worth reading before the app surprises you.

It is a queue, and it empties

Your feed holds the posts other people addressed to you that you have not looked at yet. That is the whole of the rule. Nothing is chosen for you and nothing is added: no ranking, no scoring, no suggested posts, no advertising, no “people you may know” row, no accounts to discover. A photograph is in front of you because somebody addressed it to you: somebody you are connected to, or somebody in an album you are both in.

So the feed has an end. When the queue runs out the app says all caught up, and there is nothing more to scroll. Nothing is injected to keep you going, because there is nothing here to keep you here: no reach to grow, no total to inflate, no ranking to game.

The scrolling itself is ordinary. The app fetches more as you approach the bottom and keeps fetching until the queue is genuinely exhausted, however many pages that takes. What is different is that the last page is followed by a line of text rather than by another page.

Oldest first

The next row is always the oldest thing you have not seen. If Ana sent you a photograph on Tuesday and Bruno sent one an hour ago, you open the app on Tuesday’s.

This is deliberate and it has a cost worth stating: the most recent thing is not the first thing you see. What it buys is that the queue can actually be finished. Newest-first fills a queue at the end you read from, so an arrival lands on top of what you have not reached, the oldest unseen post sinks under everything that came after it, and all caught up recedes as fast as you approach it. Oldest-first inverts that exactly: an arrival sorts behind you, nothing is ever inserted in front of you, and the end only gets closer.

The order is by when a post reached you, not by when it was taken or written. A post somebody adds you to today arrives at the back of the queue today, even if it was posted in March.

What “seen” means, exactly

A post leaves your queue when you have looked at its first photograph. Three things have to be true at once:

  • the row is showing the first photograph, not the second or the third;
  • the actual photograph has arrived and been decoded, not the blurred placeholder the app paints while it is fetching;
  • that photograph is completely within the screen, or completely filling it, for one and a half continuous seconds. If it scrolls away, the clock starts again from nothing.

A post that leaves the queue does not come back, so the dangerous mistake is marking something seen that nobody looked at. Every ambiguity is resolved towards not-yet, which is why the rule is as strict as it is.

The first photograph is enough for the whole post. Requiring all of them would strand a post of twenty photographs in the queue for ever, which is the thing the feed exists to prevent.

Only the feed marks a post seen. Opening a post from your activity tab, from a notification, or from somebody’s profile does not take it out of your queue. The row in the feed still has to be looked at.

Nobody is told that you looked. There is no seen-by list, no viewer count and no read receipt anywhere in the app. The app does record that you saw a post, and when you first did, because that is how your queue empties, and there is no screen, route or field that reports it to the person who posted it. A version with seen-by was built once and taken out again: a per-person read receipt turns looking at a photograph into an act that gets reported, which is what this product is meant to be an escape from.

Nothing vanishes under your thumb

The moment a post is marked seen the server stops returning it. The app keeps the row exactly where it is for the rest of the session. Rows do not disappear mid-scroll, the list does not reshuffle, and nothing you are reading moves. The photograph you had swiped to stays under your thumb for as long as the row is on screen.

For the length of a session the app is deliberately holding rows the server would no longer send it. The two are reconciled at the session boundary and nowhere else.

When the feed reloads, and when it does not

A feed session ends in exactly three ways:

  • the app has been in the background for longer than 32 minutes;
  • the app is started cold;
  • you pull the feed down. The indicator is the app’s own words, pull to refresh and then refreshing, rather than a spinner.

On the next session everything you have seen is gone and anything new is there. Unseen posts stay where they are, in date order, however long they sit.

Nothing else reloads the feed. A notification arriving does not: a message is the app’s news, not yours, and it is not a fourth kind of session boundary. There is no “new posts” pill, no timed refresh and no background reshuffle. Tapping home while you are already on the feed does nothing at all, because rebuilding the queue you are holding is the one thing the feed must not do. Coming back from a post you opened returns you to the feed as you left it.

The pull is the only boundary that is a decision rather than a lapse, and it exists because otherwise the only way to say “I am done with these” would be to put the phone down for half an hour.

All caught up, and posts you’ve seen

all caught up appears only when the server has said there is nothing after the last row. It never appears because a page happened to be short.

Underneath it is one link, posts you’ve seen. That screen is the feed’s own past: everything that has been delivered to you and looked at, most recent first by when you saw it, never re-surfaced, never automatically deleted, and with no badges. Each row is the first photograph, the author, the date and the caption. There is no swiping through photographs there, because paging frame by frame through things you have already seen is browsing for its own sake.

It is worth knowing that this is the only door to that screen. It is not a row in settings, and it cannot be reached from a tab that still has unseen posts in it. If you were interrupted halfway through reading something and it has already left your queue, there is no route back to it until a queue empties. That gap is known, and it is recorded as an open question rather than explained away.

The tabs are your own filing

Across the top of the feed are your groups, with everybody first. A group you have not put anybody in has no tab, so a new account sees one.

A group tab filters by who wrote the post, according to your own filing, and not by how the author addressed it. Your family tab shows unseen posts from the people you have filed under family, whatever audience they chose at their end. Your groups are yours alone: they are not reciprocal, and nobody is ever told which of your groups they are in, or that they are in one at all. Putting Ana in dinner table does not put you in hers, and Ana cannot find out.

The number beside a tab is the count of unseen posts in it. Apart from the count of photographs on a row, it is the only number on the feed, and it is allowed because it is yours, visible to nobody else, and it goes down as you read. There is no comment count under a photograph, no reaction total, no view count and no number anywhere that somebody else can make bigger.

What is not in your feed

Your own posts. The feed is what other people sent you. There is no delivery from you to yourself, so there is no row to put there; your own posts live on your own profile, reached from the profile mark, and publishing lands you there.

Anybody’s back catalogue. When you connect to somebody and they share their past posts with you, those photographs appear on their profile at their original dates and never enter your queue: a thousand old posts arriving at once leaves the feed empty. Being added to a single post that already exists is a different thing—that delivery is stamped now, so it arrives at the back of the queue as new, and your activity tab says who put it there.

Anything that has been taken away. A post deleted for everybody leaves every feed at once, and disconnecting from somebody empties your feed of their posts, because what goes is the key rather than a permission.

Anybody you have muted. A mute is a switch on somebody’s profile and it does exactly one thing: their posts stop arriving here, and stop being counted on your tabs. Nothing is taken away—every photograph they have sent you is still on their profile, and turning the switch off puts the queue back, including whatever arrived while it was on. It is the one thing on this page that hides a post rather than removing it, and it is yours alone: they are never told. See connecting with people.

Muting somebody rebuilds the queue the next time you look at it, exactly as pulling the feed down does. That is deliberate: the first thing anybody does after muting is check, and finding the feed exactly as it was would read as the switch having done nothing.

What a row shows

A row is the author’s picture and name, the date it was posted, the photographs, and the caption. If people are named on it, a line reads with anna, bruno. If it is a contribution to an album, a line reads in Maine. If somebody reshared it, one line above the author’s name reads bruno reshared, and the row still wears the original poster’s name and face.

Up to eight photographs are a swipeable set, with dots underneath as soon as there is more than one. More than eight are shown as the first four in a grid with a link reading view all 24 into the full-screen viewer. The four are the first four in the order the author put them, never a chosen best: picking the best four would be this app ranking somebody’s photographs.

Nothing somebody posted is ever cropped away. The box a photograph is drawn in is bounded, so that one picture cannot take over the whole screen and push the caption below the fold, and a picture that does not fit that box is fitted inside it rather than trimmed. The one exception is the four-tile grid above, which squares its tiles because a contact sheet with ragged edges is harder to read, and the whole frame is a tap away. Tapping a photograph in the feed opens the post at that photograph; tapping it again there opens the full-screen viewer, which has no bound at all.

A caption is shortened to three lines in the list and never altered; the whole of it is one tap away. A name in a row opens that person’s profile, or, for somebody named on the photograph you are not connected to, the card that says who you both know. An author this phone cannot name renders as the plain word someone and goes nowhere. In an album you may see a contribution from somebody you have no connection to, because the album’s membership is the audience: the row names them, and the name is not a link, because there is no profile behind it.

A post always opens at its first photograph, wherever you open it from—a feed row, your archive, somebody’s profile, an album, the activity tab. A feed row does this even when it scrolls out of view and comes back: a row that came back on the second photograph could never satisfy the seen rule, and the post would sit in your queue for ever.

The one thing that changes where a post opens is tapping a particular photograph in the feed, which opens the post at that one. That is not the app remembering anything; it is the photograph that was under your thumb a moment earlier. Nothing records which photographs you looked at.

The activity tab

The bell on the bar is activity, and it holds the things that happen to you that no other screen already names. Today that is seven: somebody reacted to your post, somebody commented on it, somebody added you to a post, somebody accepted your request, somebody added you to an album, somebody tagged you in a post, and somebody reshared your post. Tapping a row opens the thing it is about.

A post arriving is not in there, because a post arriving is the feed’s. An add request is not in there either, because it is at the top of your own profile. The tab does not repeat what another screen already shows.

All of one post’s reactions are a single row, naming whoever reacted most recently, and it goes back to unread when somebody new reacts. It is not “anna and three others”, because that is a count of what other people did. Comments keep a row each: three comments are three things somebody wrote.

There is no unread count. Not on the bell, not on the tab, not on the link that opens it. A row that arrived since your last visit says the word new beside its date, rows you have already read are drawn in a lighter ink, and that is the whole of it. Every number in this app is your own, bounded and shrinking; a tally of what other people have done to you grows while you do nothing, which is the thing the app is trying not to be.

The bell can carry a plain dot, which has two values however many things have happened. It asks whether the newest entry is unread, so looking answers it and it goes out as the tab opens. The dot on the profile mark asks a different question, whether anybody is waiting on a decision from you, so looking answers nothing: it survives your visit and goes out only when the last request has been accepted, declined or has expired.

Notifications

The app is quiet by default, and it asks for permission to notify you on the activity tab rather than at signup. The line there reads: “Nothing here has to reach you. If you would like it to, this is where to say so.”

Five things can put a notification on your phone:

  • somebody asking to add you, in settings → notifications as when somebody wants to add me, which is the one switch that starts on;
  • somebody commenting on your post, as when somebody comments on my post, off until you turn it on;
  • a particular person posting, which is a switch on their profile reading tell me when anna posts, off for everybody until you ask;
  • somebody adding photographs to a particular album, which is a switch on that album’s own screen;
  • somebody naming you in a photograph, which has no switch of its own under notifications. It rides on let mutuals tag me, which is on until you turn it off, so allowing the name allows the notification and refusing one refuses both.

One photograph is one interruption: a post that could satisfy several of those switches at once sends exactly one notification. Being named is the clearest case—the notification about the name arrives instead of the one you would have had about the post, never beside it.

A reaction can never notify anybody, and there is no setting that could make it. There is no notification type for it, no column in the database and no route, and the settings screen says so in a line under the comment switch: “Reactions never notify anybody, and cannot be made to.” You can already see who reacted by opening your own post, so the activity row saves you the tapping; what is refused is the interruption. Having your post reshared is the same: it writes a row in your activity tab and puts no notification on your phone.

There is no “you haven’t posted in a while”, no digest, no streak and no re-engagement message of any kind. This is not a policy somebody could relax: a notification here is a single word naming what kind of thing happened, with no field a sentence could be put into.

That word is all the notification carries. No name, no caption, and no identifier for the post either, because two phones receiving the same post identifier in the same second are two people in one audience, and repeated often enough at a third party that is your social graph. The sentence you read, “anna commented on your post”, is written by your own phone out of a profile we hold only as ciphertext and cannot open. The privacy policy says what we can and cannot see.

Signing out on a phone stops that phone receiving anything for the account. It is the server that does it, in the same step that ends the session, rather than something the app has to remember on its way out.

The rest of the guide is at how it works.