Your account across places

Your account has a home. Other instances of Rivr can see you, work with you and hand you back, without a second sign-in.

What this is

Rivr is not one website. It is many, and they talk to each other.

Your account lives on one of them. That one is your home. The others can see you, work with you and send you back to your home when you need to sign something.

What you see

Most of the time you see nothing. Federation is the part that is meant to be invisible.

You notice it in four places.

Opening the profile of somebody homed elsewhere tells you their canonical profile lives on that instance, and takes you there.

Opening your own profile when your account is homed elsewhere takes you to your home.

Searching returns matches from other instances alongside your own, with anything you can already see left out so nothing appears twice.

The post composer carries a switch reading Federate this post.

Settings carries a Federation tab controlling whether this account can send content to trusted peers.

What you can do here

• Find out which instance holds your account. See Find where your account is homed.
• Push a post out beyond this instance. See Send a post to other instances.
• Act under a different name. See Act as a persona.

How to

Find where your account is homed

1. Open Profile under Manage.
2. If you are taken to another site, that site is your home.
3. If you stay where you are, this instance is your home.

Send a post to other instances

1. Start a post.
2. Find the switch reading Federate this post.
3. Switch it on and publish.

The switch is available only when your account owns a hosted node on this deployment, and only when the post is public or scoped to a place. A post restricted to named groups or named people cannot be federated, and the composer says so.

Act as a persona

1. Open Profile under Manage.
2. Find the Manage personas panel. It is drawn on your own profile only.
3. Create a persona with a name, and a handle and description if you want them.
4. Switch to it from the same panel. A note confirms the switch.
5. Switch back to your main account the same way.

What changes for you

A persona is an alternate identity you can post under. It belongs to you, and you can switch between it and your main account.

The word persona is used for a second thing on a profile, which is unrelated. That one is a card of readings such as Gene Keys and Human Design. It is a description of you, not an identity you act as.

Somebody viewing a persona's profile sees a small chip beside the name telling them it is a persona.

Signing up, resetting a password and recovering an account are always handled by the identity authority, whatever instance you are on.

Where this connects

• Instances of Rivr names the instances that are live today.
• Profile is where personas are made and switched.
• Settings carries the Federation tab.
• Who can see what explains why a restricted post cannot federate.