How-to

Your handle

Until you set one you are invisible: no address, no invites, no visitors. Nothing in the app tells you that, which is why this page exists.

What is not happening without one

An account with no handle works perfectly. You can write, link, group, generate, review and export — everything that is yours alone is unaffected. What silently does not work is everything involving another person:

You have no address. A palace lives at /p/your-handle. Without a handle there is no URL to give anyone.
Nobody can invite you. Invites are by handle — you cannot be typed into the box.
A public lens is public to nobody in particular. There is no page for it to hang off.
You cannot appear in the directory.

None of that produces an error. You can set a lens to public, feel that you have shared something, and have shared nothing — because the address it would live at does not exist.

Set one

Account menu → Account. Pick something short and lowercase that you would be happy saying out loud, and that you will still want in a year.

Handle versus display name


Handle	The address. Appears in your URL and in invites, as `@handle`. One per account, unique across everybody.
Display name	What people read. Free text, changeable at will, and it does not have to be unique — nothing points at it.

Change the display name whenever you like. The handle is the one to think about, for the reason below.

Changing it changes your address

A handle is a URL. Change it and /p/old-handle stops resolving — every link anyone has saved, posted or bookmarked breaks, and nothing forwards.

Nobody is notified, and the people affected are exactly the ones you shared with. So it is worth treating a handle the way you would treat a slug: choose it deliberately, change it rarely, and tell people when you do.

The old handle is released when you change it, which means somebody else can take it. Another reason to pick one you will keep.

Being findable is separate from being readable

Two independent things, and worth not confusing:

The handle makes you reachable — an address exists.
Each lens's audience decides what is at that address. Every lens starts private, and setting a handle changes none of them.

Appearing in the people directory is a third, separate opt-in. Setting a handle lists you nowhere. Sharing a lens.

One more thing it gates

Deleting your account. The confirmation asks you to type your handle, because typing something specific is what distinguishes a deliberate act from a click — so an account with no handle is asked to set one before it can be deleted.

Which is a slightly odd sentence — set a name in order to erase yourself — and it is the right trade. The alternative is one click destroying everything you have written, with no undo. Getting your data out, and deleting it.

Sharing a lens — what to do once you have an address.
Getting your data out, and deleting it — where the handle turns up again.