Forums and groups
A forum in Souspli is not a place. Nobody hosts it, nobody can take it down, and there is no admin panel. It is a handful of letter types that point at each other:
| A forum needs | In Souspli it is |
|---|---|
| a place | a Group letter — a roster with roles |
| a post | any letter tagged in that group |
| a thread | Comment letters that reply to a post, and to each other |
| a vote | a Vote letter: one key, for or against one letter |
| joining | a Request to join letter, answered by a new roster |
| moderation | an Attestation by someone the roster calls a moderator |
| whose opinion counts | your tribe — the keys you vouched for |
Every one of those is an ordinary signed letter that travels like any other. A forum "exists" wherever people hold its letters.
Start one
- New → Group. Give it a name and a purpose. Add members: each is a key, a role and a name. Give yourself a role; name at least one moderator if you want moderation. Publish.
- Share… it — and to make it a living forum, Post to relays on a relay you and your members have all added. A forum works on relays alone, because posts, comments and votes are small enough to travel whole.
- Tell people which relay, and send them the group letter.
You are the group's keeper: the roster is your letter, and only you can publish a new version of it.
Read and post
File → Forums… lists every group you hold. Open one to see its posts, ranked.
- Write a post starts a draft tagged into the group (a News article by default). Publish it, then post it to the relay.
- Open a post to read its thread. Comment replies to the post or to any comment; threads nest as deep as they go.
- ▲ ▼ casts a vote. A vote is signed immediately, without a confirmation dialog, because you pressed a control in Souspli itself on something already on your screen.
Anyone can tag a letter into any group — being in a forum is the author's claim, and the roster never agreed to it. What keeps that from being chaos is the next section.
Ranking: "47 votes, 6 from your tribe"
Votes are free to manufacture. A thousand throwaway keys cost nothing, so a raw count proves nothing. What cannot be faked is a path that starts at your key: the people you have vouched for, and the people they vouched for.
So every score shows both numbers, side by side, and listings sort by tribe score first, then raw score, then recency. Two people reading the same forum — the identical letters — see a different order, because each one's library weights the same votes by whose vouches reach the voter. That is the intended behaviour, not a bug: there is no global ranking for anyone to game.
If you have vouched for nobody, every tribe score is zero and the order falls back to raw popularity — the forgeable kind. The forum window tells you this in words. Vouch for someone you actually know and the order starts meaning something.
A vote is about a letter. A vouch is about a person. They are kept apart on purpose: if agreeing with someone pulled them into your trust graph, anyone could buy their way in with agreeable posts.
Joining
Press Request to join in a forum. That publishes a small letter saying you would like to be on the roster. It admits nobody: asking is not joining.
The keeper sees pending requests under Asking to join. To admit someone, the keeper opens the group, presses New version…, adds them to the roster and publishes. The request stops being pending the moment a roster names its author — nobody marks it accepted. The roster is the answer.
Someone written out in version 3 is no longer a member, whatever version 2 said: membership is always read from the latest version you hold.
Moderation
Nobody can delete anyone's signed letter, so moderation can only be advice. In Souspli it is advice you can audit:
- A verdict is an attestation — hide or endorse — that names the post and the forum, signed by a key the roster you hold calls a moderator.
- A hidden post is folded, never dropped. The row says who hid it and why, with Show anyway beside it. Disagreeing has to stay possible; that is the difference between a forum and a memory hole.
- An endorsed post carries an endorsed badge.
- A moderator's reach is exactly the roster you hold. Hold no copy of the group and nobody moderates anything for you; hold a later version that drops them and their reach ends there.
- A verdict names its forum, so moderating one group gives no power in another.
Alpha gap: verdicts are verified, honoured and displayed, but the app has no button yet for a moderator to issue one. See status.
Your main feed stays readable
A busy forum must not bury a memo from your boss. In the main feed a vote never gets its own row, and a reply folds into the post it answers, which shows reply and vote counts instead. A reply to something you do not hold still shows on its own, because hiding it would hide your only copy.