Circles and sharing

A circle is a named group of people: “Family”, “Friends”, “Thai cooking”. A person can be in several circles, or in none.

Part	Status
Circles in the server and API	On main
Circle pills on the feed, circles on the person page and add screen	On main
Circles screen: list, reorder, create, edit, delete	Available on main (W-07)
Share sheet, import screen, public share page	Available on main (W-07)

Household or private

Each circle has a visibility:

• Household. Everyone in the household sees it and members can edit it.
• Only me. Only the member who made it sees it.

People themselves are always household-wide. A private circle only hides the grouping.

Circles and your feed

Every member has an In my feed switch for each circle. With All selected, the feed shows people from the circles you have switched on, plus people who aren’t in any circle. Tap a circle pill to see only that circle.

The first welcome step offers three starter circles: Family, Friends and Favourites. Family and Friends are on by default.

A size limit for updating

A circle holds at most 30 capturable accounts: accounts on platforms the Firefox companion can capture, not counting closed-tier accounts such as personal LINE IDs. This keeps an Update circle run to 30 tabs or fewer. Adding past the limit fails with “circle full”, and Homestead suggests making a second circle.

Share links

You can share a circle as a link or QR code. Someone who opens it sees the circle name, who shared it and from which household, and the list of people with their avatars and platform badges. They can import it into their own Homestead, or download the circle as a .homestead.json file.

What a share contains:

• Names and public profile links. Never posts, stories or media.
• Relation labels (“Mom”, “ยาย”) only if you turn them on. Off by default.
• Notes only if you turn them on. Off by default.

Expiry choices are 1 day, 7 days, 30 days, 1 year or never. The default is 7 days when the circle contains family, and 30 days otherwise. Each link counts views and imports, and you can revoke it at any time.

The link is a 128-bit random token, shown once when you create it. The public page lives at /s/<token>, and its data at GET /api/v1/public/shares/{token}, which is the one endpoint other sites may read (it allows cross-origin requests).

Importing

Importing shows each person with a suggested action:

• Create a new person.
• Merge into someone you already have.
• Skip.

Then choose a target circle: an existing one, or a new one named after the shared circle.

Import by link needs a public address

When you import by link, your Homestead fetches the share from the other server. For safety it refuses private, local, CGNAT and similar addresses, so a share from a Homestead that’s only reachable on a home network or Tailscale can’t be imported by link. Use the .homestead.json file instead.

See Share a circle for the steps.

Privacy

The people in your circles never agreed to be in someone’s Homestead. That’s why share links carry only names and public profile links, why relation labels and notes are off by default, and why there are no public pages of anyone’s posts.