Discussion

Yap

A Yap is plaintext with no title. Its text may be absent or may contain up to exactly 300 Unicode extended grapheme clusters after NFC normalization, with a separate hard limit of 3,000 UTF-8 bytes. The server enforces both limits. A Yap must contain nonblank text, one to four first-party images, or a quoted Yap. Images do not consume the text allowance. Each image placement has its own alt text and can come from a new upload or your existing media library; the library item’s source visibility and original-download rules do not change when you attach it.

Originals, quotes and replies are authored Yaps with their own links and interactions. A reply can itself be replied to, quoted, liked, reposted, reacted to, bookmarked and shared. A quote carries its own text and images and shows one live card for its source; if that source becomes unavailable, the card becomes a tombstone instead of preserving a private copy. A repost is only an activity edge pointing to the original, so removing your repost does not remove anyone’s content.

Latest is strict reverse chronology for live top-level originals, quotes and repost activity. Following uses the same timeline rules but limits activity to people you follow and your own activity. Replies stay in conversations and on their authors’ profiles rather than appearing as top-level timeline entries. New activity waits behind a New Yaps control instead of moving your reading position. Safe top-level Yaps can appear in search and sitemaps; replies remain shareable by permalink but are not indexed as standalone search results.

Like and repost are single toggles. Bookmarks are private and have no public count or notification. Reactions accept one Unicode emoji or an available Kuldron emote and may coexist with the Like heart. Authors choose who may reply or quote: everyone, people they follow, mentioned people, or nobody. A root author can hide a reply from their conversation without deleting it from its author’s profile or permalink, and can detach a quote card without deleting the other person’s commentary. Muting a thread stops its later reply and mention notifications without hiding the conversation.

Authored content labels and your show, blur or hide choices apply to Yap text, images, quote cards, timelines and link metadata. Yap reports go to Kuldron’s platform queue; a topic lens has no authority over unrelated global Yaps. A private person mute removes that person’s originals and reposts from your timelines and stops their activity from notifying you, without telling them or ending a follow. Blocking applies in both directions, removes follows both ways, and prevents reads and interactions between the two accounts.

Editing can replace text, images, alt text and authored labels, but cannot move a reply or change a quote target. Replaced versions follow the public edit-history policy. Author deletion, account erasure, platform removal and DMCA removal leave the right tombstone so surviving conversations do not collapse. Removed or gated text and media are also withheld from previews, notifications, metadata, search and sitemaps.

Topics

Nobody creates a topic and nobody owns one. t/pottery is a name that works the moment you type it, and it starts holding posts as soon as somebody writes one. There is no application, no founder, no first arrival who gets to keep the name, and no mod team that comes attached to it. Follow the ones you want; your Following feed is every post from the topics and people you follow, and All is everything.

Topics is a map rather than a directory: each topic is a bubble sized by its followers and recent viewing, coloured by how much is actually being written in it, and pulled toward the topics its followers also follow — so the clusters are real audiences rather than a category tree somebody guessed at.

Posts and comments

Posts take a title and a markdown body with links and images, written against a live preview. Posts and comments can both be voted on, replies nest eight deep, and sibling comments are ordered by how confident their votes are rather than by raw score, so a comment with two upvotes doesn’t outrank one with ninety. A post you want to bring to another topic is crossposted, which points at the original instead of copying it.

Every post has its own URL that anyone can read without an account, and every comment has a permalink that opens with the thread around it. Writing, commenting and voting need an account. A poster labels anything 18+ on the way out, and which of those labels you see is a setting on your account.

You can edit what you post, and the versions you replace are kept and readable — edit history covers why, and how to withhold a version that contained something sensitive.

Search

Open search from the navigation bar or with Ctrl K. The Forums toggle searches post titles, post text and comments; Chats searches public room names and messages, plus your own private conversations when signed in. Topics finds topic names, and Yaps finds searchable top-level Yaps. Content results include a date and time, and respect the visibility rules and moderation lenses that apply to your reading.

Sorting and tags

Hot ranks by net upvotes while favouring newer posts, Top by net upvotes alone, and New by when it was posted. Top takes a window: the usual day, week, month and year, or any period you type, and every one of them is a rolling window counted back from now rather than a calendar boundary, so no timezone comes into it.

Anyone who can post can put a free-form tag on a post or a comment, and it shows there right away. Search and trending only pick a tag up once three different people have used it, so what travels describes something rather than being one person’s label. Click a tag to narrow a topic to it, or pick one up across every topic from what is trending.

Lenses

Moderation is something you choose rather than something the room comes with. A lens is a named group of moderators whose calls you apply by wearing it. A topic has as many as people care to run, none of them authoritative, so nobody moderates a subject by having got there first. Wearing one filters what you see and deletes nothing for anyone else; two people wearing different lenses are reading different versions of the same place. Wearing none is the default and the raw view.

You wear one per topic and switch freely, and one lens covers both the topic’s posts and its room. Anyone can create a lens; some are open to join, others are invite-only from their creator. Reports reach the relevant lens’s moderators, and reach Kuldron when the Terms of Service are involved — which is the one thing a lens can’t opt out of.

Rooms

Every topic has a chat room as well as posts, under the same name. It is always there and its history is kept, so it is a place rather than an event. Open the topic and the room is the chat beside the posts, with a count of who is in it right now. Anyone can read a room; writing in one needs an account.

Stream chat is the other model: scoped to one broadcast, moderated by that channel’s owner and mods, with bans that apply there alone. See Watching.

Limits

Posting, commenting, voting, reporting and creating topics or lenses all carry per-account limits, set where ordinary use never meets them. The live numbers are on Developers.