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Posts

Why posts matter​

Posts are the highest-signal input to your Essence. Every line you publish, every comment you leave, and every reaction you give becomes an EssenceSource — the raw material your House learns from. The more you write on Ratel, the richer your Essence grows, and the more useful your House becomes to the people who subscribe to it.

Browse the feed​

Your feed lives at / (home) and /posts. It is the main place to discover what other humans on Ratel are thinking about — and to find conversations worth jumping into.

  • Users Following — posts from people, teams, and Houses you follow.
  • Compass Discover — a wider mix surfaced from across the network, useful when you are looking for something new.
  • Infinite scroll — keep scrolling and the next batch loads automatically. You never need to click "next page".
  • Sort and filter — the top of the feed lets you switch between recency and engagement, and narrow by topic where available.
tip

If your feed feels too quiet, follow a few more people from the Discover tab. Posts from accounts you follow are weighted highest.

Write a post​

Click the Edit compose button anywhere in the app (or open /posts and start a new one) to launch the editor. Ratel's editor is built on Tiptap, a modern rich-text editor — no Markdown wrangling required, but everything you would expect from a serious writing tool is there.

You can use:

  • Headings (H1–H3) for structure
  • Bold, italic, and strikethrough for emphasis
  • Bulleted and numbered lists for organizing thoughts
  • Block quotes for citing other people
  • Code blocks with syntax highlighting for technical content
  • Inline links to anywhere on the web
  • Images — drag and drop, paste from clipboard, or upload from your device
  • Embeds — paste a link to a YouTube video, X post, or other supported source and Ratel will turn it into a rich preview

Posts also support hashtags (#essence) for discovery and @mentions to pull other Ratel users into the conversation.

When you are done, you have two choices: Save as draft to keep working on it later, or Publish to put it on your timeline and into the feeds of people who follow you.

Drafts​

Drafts live at /your-handle/drafts — replace your-handle with your own username. This is your private workspace for posts that aren't ready yet, and the page is owner-only — visiting someone else's drafts URL returns nothing.

Autosave behavior​

Every post in the editor is autosaved as a draft from the moment you start typing. There's no "save" button to remember — close the tab, lose connection, switch devices, and your in-progress writing is right there when you come back. The Drafts page lists each in-progress post with a Writing now badge while you're actively in it from another tab.

Stat header and filters​

The top of /your-handle/drafts is a stat strip — Total drafts, Words written, Last edited — useful as a quick "how productive have I been this month?" glance.

Filter chips below let you scope the list:

  • All · Today · This Week · Older — by recency.
  • Space-enabled — drafts that have a Space attached (i.e. drafts that will publish a post + create a Space simultaneously).

A Sort dropdown reorders the list: Recently edited (default), Oldest first, Title A → Z, Most words. The list is then bucketed into Today / This Week / Older sections so you can scan visually.

Per-draft actions​

Each draft tile shows a thumbnail, title (or Untitled draft), an excerpt, the time-ago since last edit, and an image count if you've attached any. The … menu on each tile exposes:

  • Resume editing — open the draft back in the post editor.
  • Duplicate — copy the draft to a new untitled draft (handy for templating recurring posts).
  • Export as Markdown — download a .md file of the draft body. (Export targets the body — image attachments stay in Ratel.)
  • Delete draft — permanent, no undo. (Restore-from-trash is (Coming soon).)

Team drafts​

You can also keep separate team drafts for collaborative posts at /your-handle/team-drafts. The Team's admins / members can co-author drafts there before publishing under the Team handle. Same autosave + per-draft actions, but the workspace is shared with your Team's admin tier.

Post detail page​

Every post has its own URL: /posts/:post_id. This is the page you share when you want to point someone at a specific piece of writing.

On the post detail page you can:

  • Like the post — a quick signal of agreement or appreciation. Ratel uses a thumbs-up glyph for likes.
  • Comment — start a thread or reply to someone else's comment.
  • Share — copy the link to send anywhere, or share to your favorite platform.
  • Edit square Edit (authors only) at /posts/:post_id/edit — fix typos, refine arguments, or update facts as the situation evolves.

Comments support the same Tiptap formatting as posts, so you can quote, link, and embed inside replies too.

Cross-posting​

One of Ratel's flagship features: write your post once, publish it everywhere that matters. Today Ratel syndicates posts to Bluesky Bluesky automatically. Connections for LinkedIn LinkedIn and Threads Threads are in the UI and ship next.

Connect once​

Head to /your-handle/settings/connections and connect each destination. You authorize Ratel through each platform's official login flow — your credentials never touch our servers. New users are walked through this in the /onboarding/connections flow the first time they sign in.

Toggle per post​

When you compose a post, the editor sidebar shows your connected destinations. Toggle on the ones you want to publish to — leave the rest off if a post is Ratel-only. You can mix and match per post; nothing is "all or nothing".

Mind the limits​

Each platform has its own content rules, and Ratel adapts your post to fit:

  • Bluesky Bluesky — 300 characters, so longer posts get gracefully trimmed with a link back to the full post on Ratel.
  • LinkedIn LinkedIn (Coming soon) — long-form friendly, so most posts go through as-is.
  • Threads Threads (Coming soon) — 500 characters, similar trimming behavior to Bluesky.

Pick destinations at publish time​

When you compose a post, the editor's right-hand Cross-post sidebar shows every connected destination as a row with a toggle. Defaults follow your Auto-post setting per destination (managed at /your-handle/settings/connections), but you can flip toggles per post — turn one off if a draft is Ratel-only, turn one on for a single one-off announcement.

Above the rows the sidebar shows a Reaching N networks header and a Truncated badge whenever your post will be trimmed at any destination's character limit. So you know up-front whether the published copy will lose anything.

Length-limit handling​

Each destination has a hard ceiling — Bluesky 300 chars, Threads 500 (when shipped), Farcaster 320 (when shipped), LinkedIn 3,000 (when shipped). When your Ratel post exceeds the limit:

A 1,500-character Ratel post becomes a Bluesky 280-character excerpt followed by … → ratel.foundation/posts/<id> — readers click through to read the full post on Ratel.

The trim is character-aware (won't cut mid-word) and always preserves the backlink so external readers can find the canonical version.

What the post detail page shows after publish​

The published post's detail page (/posts/:post_id) gains a Syndication panel below the post body. Each connected destination renders a row with:

  • A status badge — Published (green check + a View link to the external post), Pending (queued — awaiting dispatch), Failed (red, with a Retry now button), or Skipped (you turned the toggle off at publish time).
  • N succeeded · N failed summary at the top.
  • Engagement stats from the destination once they roll in — likes, comments, reposts.
  • An Attempt counter on Failed rows so you can tell whether a retry has already been tried.

A small Refresh button on the panel re-pulls live engagement counts on demand.

Failure handling​

Most cross-post failures fall into two categories:

  • Token expired — the destination platform revoked Ratel's access. Reconnect at /<your-handle>/settings/connections; the row's Retry now button works again the moment the token is refreshed.
  • Destination platform unavailable — the panel shows Failed with the attempt counter. Click Retry now once the platform comes back up. Ratel doesn't retry indefinitely on its own — you stay in control.
tip

If a cross-post fails (a platform was offline, your token expired, etc.), reconnect at /your-handle/settings/connections and click Retry now on the failed row to dispatch again. Future posts will sync normally once the connection is restored.

How posts feed your Essence​

Every post you publish, every comment you write, and every reaction you give is collected as an EssenceSource. Over time these sources are turned into embeddings and woven into your personal knowledge base — the foundation of your House. The more you write, the better your House understands you, and the more useful it becomes to subscribers asking it questions.

note

The full Essence pipeline (embeddings, retrieval, House Q&A) is rolling out in phases. Posts you publish today are already being captured as EssenceSources for when later phases ship.