Souspli / Docs / Use

Your first letter

Write it

Press New in the top bar and pick a type — Memo is a good first one. (The full list is on the types page; New from HTML… signs any self-contained web page of your own.)

Souspli starts a draft. A draft is unsigned, lives only on your machine, autosaves as you type, and sits in its own section of the feed marked DRAFT.

The header above the letter has a View | Edit toggle:

• Edit shows the type's own editing form.
• View shows the letter exactly as a reader will see it, under a PREVIEW — unsigned badge.

That toggle, and every other control, belongs to Souspli rather than to the letter. A letter's program can draw anything it likes inside its own rectangle; it cannot draw on the header, and it has no Publish button of its own.

Sign it

Press Publish. Souspli shows you what will be signed and asks you to confirm. When you approve:

• the draft becomes a real letter, signed with your key;
• its identity becomes the hash of its content — change one byte and it would be a different letter;
• it appears in your feed with your address and a ✓ signed mark in the header.

Nothing has left your machine. Publishing signs; it does not send.

Attach things

Types that take attachments (Poster, News article, Memo) let you pick files in Edit mode. Attachments travel inside the letter and are covered by your signature: nobody can swap your picture for another.

Limits in the current build: 32 MiB per attachment and 64 MiB per draft while editing; 256 MiB for a whole letter. Images, audio and video display in place. A PDF or spreadsheet can be enclosed and will arrive intact, but the sealed container cannot open it — the letter lists it honestly by name, type and size, and Share… → Save as file… gets the bytes out.

Read someone else's

Any of these opens a letter:

• double-click a .thing file;
• drag it onto the window, or press Open file…;
• paste a bundle, a link or a name into the Ingest box.

Before a single pixel is drawn, Souspli decodes the bundle, verifies the signature, and checks the hash of the program and of every attachment. If anything fails, the whole letter is refused — there is no partial admission.

Then look at the header. It is the only place that can tell you the truth:

The feed lists each letter by who signed it first, and under that the line the letter calls itself by — an article's title, a memo's subject, the first line of a comment. That second line is the author's wording, not something Souspli checked: it is shown as plain text, in quieter ink, with anything that could imitate a ✓ or rearrange the row stripped out. Sealed letters show no title, because the feed's index is a file on disk and their words never go there.

A letter can claim anything in its own content — "signed by the Bank of England" in big letters. The header is where you check.

Reply, and other things you can do to a letter

With a letter open, the header offers:

• Comment — start a reply. It is a new letter of yours that points at this one.
• Co-sign… — add your signature to a document that expects several.
• ▲ ▼ — vote for or against it. Why votes are not likes.
• Share… — get it to someone.

and, behind ⋯, the things you do less often:

• Attest — sign a statement about it ("accurately reproduced", "I witnessed this", or your own words). More.
• New version… / Your version… — amend your own letter, or start your own line rooted on someone else's.
• Copy — start a new draft of your own from its content.
• Delete — remove it from your library. Copies already shared are unaffected.
• the letter's full hash, with a Copy button.

Counts of comments and attestations appear in the header once there is one to show. In a narrow window a few more controls step into ⋯ until the row fits, and come back when it does; nothing is ever removed.

Each of these produces a new signed letter of yours. Nothing ever modifies the one you are looking at.