People and accounts
Homestead is organised around faces and names, not around apps. A person is someone you follow: Mom, your cousin Lin, a cook you like. An account is that person’s profile on one platform. Mom can have an Instagram account and a Facebook account, and both belong to “Mom”.
A person
Section titled “A person”| Field | What it’s for |
|---|---|
| Name | How the person appears everywhere. Up to 80 characters. |
| Relation label | Free text such as “Mom”, “外婆” or “ยาย”. Up to 40 characters. |
| Kind | family, friend, creator or other. |
| Closeness | Closest, Close or Following (1, 2 or 3). It weights the feed and visit suggestions. |
| Notes | Anything you want to remember: “Likes orchids. Birthday 3 Feb.” Up to 2000 characters. |
| Avatar | Picked from one of their accounts, or uploaded. |
| Circles | The groups they belong to. See Circles and sharing. |
When you add someone to a Family circle, Homestead sets kind family and closeness
“Closest”. Otherwise it guesses friend or creator from the circle and sets “Close”. You can
change both on the person page.
An account
Section titled “An account”An account is one profile on one platform, stored with its canonical handle and profile link. A handle can only appear once per platform in a household, so pasting the same link twice tells you it’s “Already added”.
Each account has a status, shown on the person page:
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
pending | Just added, not fetched yet. |
ok | Fetching works (“Up to date”). |
stale | Shown as “Not updated recently”. |
needs_agent | The platform blocked the server; an agent has to fetch this one. |
login_required | The agent’s browser hit a login wall. Log in to the platform in that browser. |
not_found | The profile doesn’t exist (or no longer does). Fix the handle to try again. |
error | Repeated failures, or the agent was blocked by a challenge. |
paused | Shown as “Paused”. |
closed | A closed platform; Homestead only suggests visits (“Visit only”). |
The refresh button on an account row asks for a fetch sooner.
The person page
Section titled “The person page”The person page shows the accounts with their status, the circles, notes and a grid of recent moments. Visit opens the person’s app. Viewers see the page but can’t edit or remove.
Finding people
Section titled “Finding people”The People list has a search box and three sorts:
- Name, A to Z, in your language’s order (pinyin for Chinese, dictionary order for Thai).
- Recently active.
- Least visited, to find who you haven’t checked on.
Search matches names, relation labels and handles. It ignores case and full-width versus
half-width characters, matches Chinese names by full pinyin or initials (wangxiaoming,
wxm), and matches Thai with or without tone marks.
Removing someone
Section titled “Removing someone”Removing a person hides them straight away, with an Undo. Homestead keeps them for 30 days in case you change your mind; after that, their accounts, moments and media are deleted.
Moments
Section titled “Moments”A moment is one item from an account: a story, post, video, link or text.
Stories expire, usually after 24 hours. Moment text is always stored and shown as plain
text. Homestead keeps stories for 7 days and posts for 60 days by default.
Homestead never translates what people write. Names, notes and posts stay in the language they were written in.