Frequently Asked Questions

Sociory is a thoughtful social platform built on three core values: community, creativity, and harmony. The main public space is Circle — topic-based communities anyone can browse, and members can post to. Your personal content lives on your Podium, and your home feed has four tabs: For You (a blended feed), Following (chronological posts from people you follow), Top Rated (the highest-rated public posts) and Trending (the most active ones). A community rating system called Sociory Aura helps the best content surface naturally. No algorithmic amplification, no hidden ranking.

No. Circle posts, public Podiums, and public favorites are all readable by anyone without an account. You only need to sign up to post, comment, join circles, follow people, rate content, or save things to your Notebook wall.

Your handle is your unique public identifier on Sociory — the short name that appears in your profile URL as /@yourhandle. You choose it at signup. Handles are lowercase, can contain letters, numbers, and hyphens, and must be unique across the site. Your handle cannot be changed after signup, so choose carefully.

Almost anything — 3 to 32 characters using only letters, numbers, and hyphens. A few categories of names are unavailable:

System routes — words like settings, login, api, and subscribe are actual pages or URL paths the platform uses. Claiming one as a handle would create a real conflict, so they are permanently off the table.

Overly generic terms — words like news, ai, or history are blocked as personal handles because no single person should own them. These are valid Circle names though — those namespaces are fully independent.

Status claims — words like official, verified, or admin are reserved to prevent impersonation of the platform itself.

Handles must also follow our core values. We reserve the right to remove or change handles that are offensive, impersonate a real person or organisation, or falsely imply platform affiliation.

You can create an account with an email address and password, or sign in with your Google account. More sign-in options are planned.

Sociory is for adults: you must be 18 or older to create an account, and you confirm this at signup. See the Terms of Service for details.

Sociory is built on community, creativity, and harmony, and the content rules follow from those values: no adult content, no gratuitous violence, and no extreme, harmony-breaking content. The Community Guidelines spell out exactly what is not allowed, how moderation works, and how appeals are handled.

Your Podium is your personal public wall, found at /@yourhandle. It is where you post status updates, short notes, links, and commentary. Every account gets one automatically at signup. Visitors can read your public posts, comment on them, rate them, and follow you — all without needing their own account (though interaction requires one).

Only you. Your Podium belongs to you. Other users can comment on your posts, but only you can create new posts there.

A cross-post (or X-post) lets you re-share another user's public post into a space you can post to, embedding the original content with full attribution. It is similar to a retweet or repost. The original author is notified when their content is cross-posted. You can add your own commentary alongside it.

Anywhere you are allowed to post. Use Share → X-post on a public post and pick a destination: your own Podium or a Circle you have joined. The original is embedded with full attribution, and you can add your own commentary above it.

No. A cross-post is a re-share of someone else's work, so it is not rated with Sociory Aura — ratings stay on the original post where they belong. You rate the source, not the reshare.

Yes. On your own Podium, each post has a delete button. Deletion is permanent — deleted posts cannot be recovered.

A Circle is a topic-based public community — the main way to discover and share content with people beyond your follow graph. Each Circle has a handle (like /circle/music) and an optional description. Anyone can read a Circle's posts. Joining a Circle lets you post into it. All public Circle posts are surfaced in the Discover tab regardless of whether you have joined.

Any joined member. Circle posts are always public and always show the author's handle, so there are no anonymous posts in a Circle.

A Circle's host can also enable 'Restrict posting' in Circle settings, which limits posting to members who were explicitly added — useful for curated or moderated topics.

Go to Circle → Create Circle (you must be logged in). Choose a handle — that is both the Circle's name and its URL. Handles cannot be changed after creation, so pick something descriptive. You become the Circle's host and can manage its settings from the settings page.

Almost anything — a Circle name should reflect its topic and invite conversation. Good names are specific enough that prospective members know what to expect: photography, local-history, or python-devs all work well.

Circle names must adhere to our core values. We reserve the option to remove or change names that are offensive, deceptive, or otherwise harmful.

A small set of words are unavailable because they map to actual pages or routes in the platform — for example settings, new, join, and subscribe are real URL paths the platform uses, so they cannot double as Circle names. Many topic words that are reserved as personal handles (like ai or news) are perfectly fine as Circle names — Circle and handle namespaces are fully independent.

The host created the Circle. They can update the description, enable or disable the posting restriction, and delete the Circle. They can also remove posts that violate the Circle's topic. Guides (if any are assigned) share moderation duties with the host.

No. A Circle is owned by the community as a whole. A host is its primary caretaker but does not enjoy absolute authority over it. Hosts may be promoted or removed at the discretion of Sociory to better meet our core values.

The home feed (/) has three tabs:

For You — a blended feed that interleaves posts from the people you follow with a curated selection of Circle content. Good starting point if you want one stream.

Following — a strict reverse-chronological feed of posts from everyone you follow. Nothing is re-ordered or injected; you control exactly what appears by choosing who to follow.

Discover — public Circle posts from across Sociory, ranked by your Sociory Gravity settings rather than time alone. Open discovery: you will see great content even from communities you have not joined.

Visit their Podium (/@theirhandle) and click the Follow button on their profile. Once you follow someone, their new Podium posts appear in your Following tab (and the For You blend). You can unfollow at any time from Settings → Follows.

You follow other users — their Podium posts show up in your Following tab. You join Circles — this lets you post into them, and their public posts are surfaced in the Discover tab. The two verbs are deliberate and mean different things: following is about people, joining is about places.

Discover is your open discovery feed — public posts from Circles across the whole site, ranked by how much you have told Sociory you want to see them rather than by time alone. Unlike Following (which shows only the people you follow, newest first), Discover is open: you will see great content even from communities you have not joined. What rises for you is shaped by your Sociory Gravity settings, not by a hidden engagement algorithm.

Following is the stuff you deliberately chose: a plain reverse-chronological feed of the people you follow. Discover is for finding new things: public Circle posts from across Sociory, ordered by your Sociory Gravity. Following is your inner circle in time order; Discover is the wider world, weighted to your taste.

Joining a Circle lets you post into it and signals it is a community you are part of. You do not need to join a Circle to read it or to see its posts in Discover — Discover already spans every public Circle. Join the ones you want to contribute to.

Sociory Gravity is a private dial you set on a person, a Circle, or a single post to say how much of it you want in your feeds: Muted, Reduced, Normal, or Highlighted. Highlighted content rises in your Discover tab (and pulls in more like it); Reduced sinks; Muted disappears from Discover entirely. Normal is the default and stores nothing. Gravity only ever changes your feeds — it never affects what anyone else sees.

Yes. What you mute, reduce, or highlight on a person or a post is yours alone and is never shown to them or anyone else. The one exception is a Circle's overall Sociory Gravity Score — like its Sociory Aura Score, a Circle shows an aggregate on its page as a public signal of how much the community wants to see it. Your individual setting that fed into it stays private.

The broader setting wins, on purpose: muting a person overrides highlighting one of their posts or loving a Circle they are in. That way muting someone actually works — a muted person stays out of your feeds even in a Circle or on a post you would otherwise want.

Tags are optional keywords you can add to a post to say what it is about. They show on the post and help the right people find it — tags also feed into how Discover surfaces 'more like this' when you highlight something. Tags work best when they are specific and few.

The Notebook is your private wall for saving content. It lives at /@yourhandle/wall/notebook and is always visible only to you. Save any post using the Save button and it lands here. Within your Notebook you can also mark items as Favorites, which is a separate, opt-in-public category.

The Notebook is one of several personal walls in the Wall system — alongside your Friends wall and any boards you create. Find all your walls at /@yourhandle/wall.

Saved items are private to you — a personal reading list or bookmark collection, never shown publicly. You can save anything without anyone knowing.

Favorites are a curated subset of your saved items that you have opted to highlight. By default they are private too. You can toggle individual favorites to appear on your public Podium, where visitors will see a 'Favorites' section showing up to eight of them — with a link to /@yourhandle/favorites for the full list if you have more than eight.

Sociory Aura is our 5-star rating system for posts and comments. Any authenticated, email-verified user can rate content they did not author (cross-posts excluded). Ratings help readers quickly gauge how the community values a piece of content.

Sociory Aura Score is the average star rating for a post or comment. It is only displayed once at least 3 people have rated it, to avoid a single vote looking misleadingly definitive.

AuraScope is the total number of ratings a piece of content has received, and is always visible alongside any Aura Score. A high AuraScope means many people weighed in; a low one means the score may shift as more people rate it.

A user's overall Aura — shown as a badge on their Podium and in their account menu — is simply the aggregate of ratings on the content they have shared in that section. It reflects how that content has resonated with the community; it is not a score of the person. Aura rates posts and comments, never people.

No. You cannot rate posts or comments you authored. You can rate other users' content freely (except cross-posts, which are excluded from Sociory Aura). There is a short cooldown between ratings.

No. Perfection is not a realistic goal. The goal is to improve our shared experience. Whether that lands a 2.5, 3, 4.5 or whatever, it tells us about ourselves as a community and that we still have room to grow and improve.

No. Sociory Aura and Sociory Gravity measure two different things. Aura is about the quality of a specific post or comment — you might think a post is great and give it 5 stars, but that does not mean you want to see more of that topic. Gravity is about how much you personally want to see similar content going forward — it is a private dial you set on a user, Circle, or piece of content, not a public rating.

Messages are private conversations — one-on-one or small groups — separate from anything you post publicly. They do not appear on your profile, in feeds, or anywhere but your inbox and the inboxes of the people in the conversation. Start one from the Message button on someone's profile or the New message button in your inbox.

You choose in Settings → Messages: Everyone (the default — people you do not follow reach you through Requests first), People I follow (only accounts you follow can start a conversation), or No one (turns off new incoming messages entirely). You can change this any time.

When someone you do not follow messages you, it lands in Requests rather than your main inbox. You can read it to decide, but it will not ping you as unread and the sender is not told whether you have seen it. Accept it (replying counts as accepting), decline it, or decline and block. Until you accept, the sender can only send a few messages, so Requests cannot be used to flood you.

Yes — a conversation can hold up to 32 people. Whoever starts a group is its admin and can name it, add people, and remove them; anyone can leave at any time. Adding someone follows the same permission rules as starting a conversation, so people who have limited who can message them still get a request rather than being pulled in automatically.

For 15 minutes after sending, you can unsend — it is removed for everyone in the conversation, leaving a small placeholder so the thread still reads in order. Separately, Delete for me removes a message or a whole conversation from your view any time; it does not touch anyone else's copy, and a conversation you have cleared comes back if a new message arrives.

No, and we would rather be plain about that than imply otherwise. Messages are private between the people in the conversation and protected in transit, but they are not end-to-end encrypted. We access message content only to handle abuse or a legal request, and when you report a conversation you share it with our moderation team. The Privacy Policy covers exactly how messages are handled. If you need truly end-to-end-encrypted messaging, use a tool built specifically for that.

No — deliberately. Sociory does not show others when you have read a message or whether you are typing. Your unread markers are for you only.

Block them — in the conversation's options, or from Settings → Messages. A block stops direct messages in both directions and removes follows between you and the blocked person. Blocked users also stop seeing your content across the site — and you stop seeing theirs.

Notifications are your in-app inbox for activity on your content — when someone comments on or replies to your posts, or favorites them. They live behind the bell in the top bar, which shows a count when something is new.

Yes — Settings → Notifications lets you turn notification types on or off individually, so you only hear about what you care about.

Not through the notification bell — Messages have their own unread badge, separate from notifications, so private conversations and public activity stay in their own lanes. Check the Messages icon for new conversations.

Not today. The only emails Sociory sends are the essentials — verifying your address and resetting your password. There are no activity or digest emails; notifications live in the app.

Use the Report option on a post or comment, or in a private conversation's menu. Reports go to our moderation team so we can review them; serious safety issues are prioritized. You can also reach us directly at safety@sociory.com for anything urgent or sensitive.

Sociory is built on community, creativity, and harmony, and the content rules follow from that: no adult content, no gratuitous violence, and no extreme, harmony-breaking content. The Community Guidelines are the full, canonical rules — what is not allowed, how moderation works, and how appeals are handled.

Yes. Block someone from their profile page, from a conversation, or from Settings → Blocks. A block is mutual and site-wide: it stops direct messages in both directions, removes any follows between you, and means neither of you will see the other's content anywhere on Sociory — feeds, profiles, or comment threads.

For general questions, email support@sociory.com. For anything about safety or a report, use safety@sociory.com.

Everything lives under Settings: Profile (display name, bio, time zone), Follows (who you follow, with unfollow), Notifications (which alerts you get), Messages (who can reach you, and blocks), Landing page (where you go after logging in), and Security (change password, delete account).

Yes — Settings → Landing page lets you pick where you land after signing in: the home feed, your own Podium, or another main page. Pick whatever you actually open first.

Go to Settings → Profile to update your display name, bio, and time zone. Your display name and bio can be changed at any time. Your handle cannot be changed after signup.

No. Your email address is used only for login, verification, and transactional messages (like password reset). It is never displayed to other users or included in any public profile information.

If you are logged in and know your current password, go to Settings → Security to change it directly.

If you have forgotten your password, use 'Forgot password?' on the Log in page. You will receive a reset link by email that expires in one hour. Using it signs you out of all other active sessions.

Go to Settings → Security and scroll to the 'Delete account' section. Confirm with your current password (leave it blank if you signed up with Google and have no password set).

Your personal information is permanently removed, all active sessions and API keys are revoked, and you are signed out immediately. Posts and comments you created are anonymised rather than deleted so threads remain coherent for other users.

No. In brief: we collect only what is necessary to run the service, store it on servers we operate, and do not sell or share it with third parties for advertising. See the Privacy Policy for the full picture.