Highlights

A highlight is the lightweight, ephemeral counterpart to the household feed. You drop a photo or a short video, add an optional caption, and it lands in the Highlights inbox of every paired household. It expires on its own — 30 days by default, or whatever retention window you set — and is then purged from disk, on your server.

Highlights live under Talk → Highlights in the sidebar.

How it works

• One highlight per author per day. A highlight is a small album of frames; each post during the same day appends a frame to today’s highlight rather than creating a new one. New day → new highlight row.
• Audience. You pick from three options when you post:
  • All paired households — every confirmed paired household.
  • Specific households — the households you choose.
  • Specific people — particular people in those households.
• Retention. Default 30 days, configurable per author from 1 to 90 days in Settings → Privacy. The retention scheduler prunes expired rows hourly.
• Replies & reactions. Tap a frame to react with an emoji; swipe up or hit the ✉ chip to reply via DM with a snapshot of the frame attached, so the conversation stays meaningful even after the original frame expires.
• Archive. Browse → Highlight archive is a calendar grid of every highlight still inside its retention window — yours and every paired household’s. Days with highlights are clickable; tap a date to see who posted that day.

Privacy

• Highlight frames are sealed from your home to the other household’s, the same way DMs are. Nothing on the way can open them.
• Frames are signed by your household; a receiving household drops forgeries before they ever land in its database.
• The personal block list (Settings → Privacy → Blocked accounts) hides every highlight from a blocked author across every surface — inbox, archive, and the rings on top of the page — without leaking a “you’ve been blocked” signal.

Sharing publicly via a Global Server

Sometimes you want to send a highlight to someone who isn’t on Social Home — a friend on Twitter, a relative who only checks email. From the highlight viewer, the author can tap Publish public link and pick a paired GFS (Global Federation Server) — the relay that helps households find each other. The GFS hands back a URL like

https://gfs.example/highlight/{instance}/{highlight}/{token}

Anyone with that URL can open the highlight in a browser. The pictures travel directly from your server to the visitor’s browser; the GFS only introduces the two. If that direct path can’t be set up (a strict office network, say), the GFS passes the frames through — but only while your home is online, and it stores none of them. The same retention you set on the highlight applies to the public link too: when the highlight would have been purged for paired households, the public URL stops working.

You can mint several tokens per highlight (one per platform, say) and revoke any of them individually. The author can also pull every token at once with Unpublish if the link gets out of hand.

This is the only Social Home surface where content is intentionally readable without a household identity, and it’s per-highlight opt-in — nothing leaves your home server until you flip the toggle.

Under the hood

The GFS brokers a WebRTC handshake between the author’s server and the visitor’s browser; highlight bytes then flow over that direct connection. When WebRTC fails, the GFS falls back to an HTTP pass-through that streams frames from the author’s server while it is reachable — zero highlight bytes are written to the relay’s disk in either path. Tokens are per-highlight, per-link, and revocable individually or all at once.

Reporting

If a highlight breaks community norms — spam, harassment, inappropriate content, misinformation — open the ⋯ menu on the viewer and choose Report. The report lands in the household admin’s review queue — the same one that handles posts, comments, and Momentum reports — for the admin to triage.

Under the hood

Reports are rows in the unified content_reports table; admins list them at /api/admin/reports?status=pending.

Federation

Highlights travel between households the same way DMs and space content do: sealed, signed, and checked for replays on arrival. Reactions and view-receipts find their way back to the author’s household so the chip on the frame counts correctly.

Under the hood

Highlights use the §24.11 inbound pipeline shared with DMs and space content: signed envelopes, replay-cache protected, routing fields in plaintext and every content field encrypted. Reactions and view-receipts ride a unicast back-channel to the author’s household.