How-to

Sharing a lens

Two layers, and the second one wins. The lens decides who may open it; a node marked restricted stays yours regardless.

Before you start

Set a handle. It is your public address — /p/your-handle — and without one you are invisible: nobody can find you, invite you, or visit anything you share. Nothing warns you about this, which is exactly why it is the first line here. Your handle.

Layer one: who may open the lens

In lens settings, each lens carries an audience:

Audience	Who can walk it
Private	You. The default, and where every lens starts.
Friends	Your accepted friends — public nodes only.
Public	Anyone with the link — public nodes only.

The audience is per lens, not per account. A public Watergate lens and a private journal can sit side by side in the same palace, and nothing about one implies anything about the other.

Named invites

Separately from the audience, you can invite specific people by @handle. That grants one person access to one lens without making it public and without them being a friend — the right tool for “show this to my supervisor”.

Invites are listed in lens settings with the people who hold them, and revoking is one click. Revoke takes effect for the next thing they try to open; there is no window where a revoked grant keeps working.

Layer two: restricted nodes

A node can be marked restricted, and that mark lives on the node rather than on any lens. So it holds everywhere the node appears — including in a lens you have made public, and including in a lens you refracted it into afterwards.

That is what “public nodes only” means in the audience descriptions. Sharing a lens shares the lens; it never overrides a node you marked yours.

The same mark does a second job: a restricted node is never sent to a hosted model, in any mode, with any setting. One bit, two guarantees, and neither of them is a preference that can be toggled off by accident. What leaves this app.

What a visitor actually sees

The graph, minus your restricted nodes. Links that pointed at one simply are not there.
Nodes — titles, definitions, bodies, links.
Your routes, which they can walk. Usually the best thing to hand somebody: it shows what you think, not just what you have written. Routes and walks.

They cannot edit anything, generate anything, or spend anything of yours.

Check before you publish, not after. A quick pass: filter to restricted and confirm the list is what you expect, then open the lens in a private window to see what a stranger sees. A public lens is public to anyone with the link — sharing is one step away from anyone, and there is no recall on a page someone has already read.

Friends

Friendship is mutual and has to be accepted, so a friends lens is genuinely bounded rather than open to anyone who finds your handle. Removing a friend removes their access to everything set to friends, in the same moment.

There is also a directory, and appearing in it is opt-in. Being findable and being readable are separate settings, and neither implies the other.

A shared lens is not a copy

People you share with are looking at your lens, live. Edit a node and they see the edit; delete one and it is gone for them too. Nobody gets a snapshot, and nobody can keep reading after you set the lens back to private.

The exception is the one you make deliberately: a downloaded lens skill carries your node names out as a file, and a file cannot be recalled. You are asked before that happens, and the default is no.

Your handle — the prerequisite for any of this.
What leaves this app — the other thing restricted protects you from.
Routes and walks — the best thing to give a visitor.