How OSS works

A short tour of everything on this site!

1. The map

2. Your site

• Signing up creates it: a site at /{username}, plus a root category named after you. Nothing to set up.
• It can't be deleted — only Disabled (hidden from visitors) and later Restored.
• Settings tab: name, description, social preview image, favicon, visibility (Public / Private / Cohort), Site styles (fonts, colors, background, content width — the defaults every page inherits), show/hide the page title, show/hide navigation, custom scripts (admin only).
• Four tabs on a personal site: Settings · Navigation · Pages · Categories. Pages is the home screen.

3. Pages

• Draft vs published, in one line: a draft has no public address and lives only in your dashboard; publishing gives it one and puts it in the feeds. Leaving the address box blank on create is what keeps it a draft.
• Published address is /{username}/{path}. Your homepage is /{username}.
• The editor: type, or press / for headings, quotes, lists, code, dividers, grids and a live feed block; the toolbar inserts images, video, audio, embeds and galleries. It saves as you write.
• Side panel tabs: Meta (title, address, cover image, visibility, share link, Publish), Design (this page's own overrides of the site styles), Nav (the site's menu, without leaving the editor), Categories.
• Categories and tags unlock after you publish.
• Preview gives you a private link for a draft.
• Deleting is deleting — one action, no undo, and it drops the page from every feed, archive and menu.
• /pages lists everything you've written, with inline rename, Publish, and Delete right on each row.

4. Categories and tags — what assigning actually does

What they are. A category is a folder you own — nested, up to three levels deep, hanging under a root named after you (or your cohort). A tag is a flat label shared by everyone; type a new one and it's created. 10 tags per page, 50 per site.

What assigning does — and doesn't:

• It does not change the page's address.
• It does not move the page to another site or another owner.
• It does put the page on that category's page at /category/…, on every parent category's page too (picking a child files it under every parent automatically), and in any feed block filtered on it.
• A tag does the same for /tag/{name} — no parents, no hierarchy.
• Only published pages on a live site ever show up publicly.

Cohort categories. If you're in a cohort, its categories show up in the picker on your own pages. Tag your page with one and it appears on the cohort's hub — the page stays yours, at your address, on your site. Personal and cohort categories coexist on one page; nothing gets exclusive. Leave the cohort and the page quietly drops off the hub — you keep the page.

Managed at /categories (everything you own) or a site's Categories tab (that site plus its tags).

5. Navigation

• Two separate trees, and this is the one thing that trips people up: the page tree makes addresses, the navigation tree makes the menu. Dragging a page around the menu never changes its URL.
• Pages are hidden from the menu until you add them. Unplaced ones sit in "Available pages" with an Add button; "Seed from page hierarchy" fills an empty menu in one click.
• A menu item can be a page, an external link, a category, or a tag.
• Nest as deep as you like. Menu edits save themselves.
• Two placements: a side rail (default) or a top bar; the top bar has two styles and its own alignment options.

6. Cohorts

• A cohort is a group with its own public site at /{slug}, its own categories, and its own chat room. Whoever creates it is its lead.
• Creating one needs a title, a URL name and a cover image; the site and root category are made for you.
• A cohort site has the same four tabs plus Members and Permissions, visible to leads only.
• Archive — the cohort stays public and readable, but nobody can change anything until it's unarchived. Leads and admins included. Reversible.
• Delete — the site, its pages and its categories go, for everyone, with no undo. Members keep pages they wrote on their own sites — those pages lose the cohort connection but keep their content and address.

7. Who can do what in a cohort

That's a new member with nothing customized. A few things to know:

• Leads have everything, and are the only ones who see Members and Permissions.
• Admins have full access to every cohort without joining it.
• A lead changes any of this at the Permissions tab: one row per member, checkboxes across the four rows above, one Save button. Role changes (Member ↔ Lead) apply immediately; checkbox changes apply on Save.
• Turning off See for a row hides that whole tab from that person. Turning on Change or Create turns See back on automatically.
• Even with Settings access, only a lead can change the cohort's URL name or archive it.
• A cohort can never be left without a lead — the last one can't be demoted or removed.
• A box a lead never touched keeps following the default, so if the default ever changes, untouched members pick up the new one automatically.

8. Invites

• Nobody is added to a cohort. Everybody is invited. Both ways a lead brings someone in — by email, or by picking them from a username search — send the same invite. Having an account isn't consent.
• Invites last 7 days. Sending again to the same address replaces the old one and restarts the clock.
• Accepting is a deliberate Join click — opening the link never spends it on its own.
• Accepting adds you as a member and, if you didn't already have one, sets up your own site so you can start publishing right away.
• Lost the email? Every live invite to your verified address is listed on /activity with the same Join button, plus Decline.
• Leads can revoke a pending invite — the emailed link stops working immediately.
• Leads remove members from the Members tab. There's no self-serve Leave button — ask a lead to remove you.

9. Feeds and Explore

• /feed — the newest 50 published pages across the whole site. Drafts, private pages and pages on disabled sites never show up. Signed in, you also see your own pages plus cohort-only pages from cohorts you're in.
• Six sort options, the same everywhere: created / published / updated, newest or oldest first. They reorder that window — they don't page back through history.
• /explore — a directory of cohorts and artists, not pages. No sorting; the rows aren't dated.
• /feed.xml — RSS, always the public view in the default order.
• Feed block — drop a live feed into any page, filtered by category, tag or author, with control over layout, columns, card colors, image shape and which parts of the card show.

10. Activity

• /activity is where an invite, a message or a change to your account lives after the email announcing it is gone. Three sections: Invites · Conversations · Account activity.
• Account activity covers tier changes, suspension/reinstatement, profile edits, cohorts you joined or now lead, and invites you sent that got accepted. Newest 30 — a nudge, not an archive.
• The bell badge in the sidebar counts pending invites, plus unread conversations, plus anything new since your last visit.

11. Chat

• One room per cohort, open to its active members. Direct messages between any two people who share an active cohort — no shared cohort, no DM.
• Rooms open from a cohort page or a member's card; there's no room to create by hand.
• @ mentions a member, # links a category or a published page — both become real links for everyone in the room.
• Online means seen in the last 5 minutes. Messages always save, even when live delivery is down.
• Opening a room marks it read, which clears its share of the Activity badge.