People and messages

Following by @handle, profiles, who may write to you, blocking, and the chat inside the instance.

There are no friend requests. You follow somebody by their @handle, with nobody to approve it, and anyone signed in can see how many people follow an account and how many it follows.

Finding people

In the panel, the Connections and chat button in the header opens a drawer: one list of your conversations, your own counts, and a search that matches part of a handle as you type. Nobody ever finds themselves, and a list marks you as You, without a button. A result opens a card with the person's counts and Follow, Message and Block.

Follower and following counts are links. They open the list of people, each one with Follow or Unfollow, and a person in a list opens their profile. The settings page has the same lists.

Profiles

In the settings page, Account is your profile: the picture first, then your name, one action as wide as the column, your follower and following counts, and an activity graph. The picture is the edit button: click it, or reach it from the keyboard, to change it. The @handle appears under the name only when the two differ.

Somebody else's profile has the same shape, with Follow or Unfollow as the one action.

The activity graph shows how much somebody used the extension each day, as totals and nothing else, never command names. It shows nothing when they turned Show my activity on my profile off, which is on by default, or when either of you blocked the other.

Who may write to you

You choose, in the settings page:

Somebody you wrote to first can always reply. A script package goes only to a mutual follow, whatever the message setting says.

A conversation you cannot write in says why, in place of the box to type in.

Blocking

A block removes the follows both ways, and stops following, messaging and sharing in either direction. Only whoever blocked can lift it, and the person blocked cannot see that it exists.

The chat

Messages arrive at once over a live connection, with polling as the fallback when a network blocks it. Unread messages put a count on the header button and play a short notification sound.

The server never hands your email or your message setting to another account. What it tells a client about somebody else is only whether that client may write to them.