Guide
Writing a drop
Compose, the Details card, and the path a piece of writing takes from draft to published.
Before you have an account
The front page asks “What would you like to keep right now?” and opens the real Compose screen. You use the same rich editor and tags before or after signing in; title, pictures, URL, Space and publishing controls become available with an account.
Press Keep this thought to save it into the Guest Archive on this device. The first successful save offers Open Constellation or Keep writing without moving you automatically. If browser storage is unavailable, the words stay in the editor and sizuq tells you that the save failed.
The shape of Compose
Compose puts the writing first: the editor sits at the top of the page, full width, with nothing above it. Everything else — title, tags, address, reflection — is folded into a Details card underneath, and none of it is required.
You can write a drop with no title at all. An untitled drop is a short note; it appears in the Observatory and in your garden's /drops feed. A drop with a title is treated as an article and gets a place in your garden's article grid.
The Details card
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Title | Optional. Adding one turns the drop into an article. |
| URL slug | Optional, and only used on a garden. Sets a readable address like your-garden.com/my-essay-title. Lowercase letters, digits and hyphens. |
| Tags | Up to 10, comma-separated. Lowercase; a tag can hold letters, digits, hyphens and underscores. |
| Featured | Pins the drop to the hero row at the top of your garden home. The Order field decides which pinned drop comes first. |
| Language | The language you are writing in. It decides which language-variant domain the drop is indexed on. |
| Space | Optional. Publishes the drop into a room shared with other people rather than only onto your own surfaces. |
| Reflection delay | How long the drop must sit before it can be published. Immediate, 30 seconds, 1 minute or 2 minutes. |
| Cover image | The picture used on social cards, and in the featured row. Needs the drop to exist first, so it appears once a draft has been saved. |
Everything starts as a draft
With an account, Keep for myself settles the thought as Only me and places it in Constellation. Save draft keeps it under Continue instead. Neither action publishes it.
Pressing Prepare to publish does not publish anything yet. It saves the drop as a draft and opens the Reflection moment. Publishing happens only when you confirm there. There is no path through sizuq that skips the draft — not the interface, and not the API underneath it.
A draft is invisible to everyone except you. It does not appear in the Observatory, in your garden, in RSS, or at its own address for anyone else. If you close the tab, it is still there.
- Write. The editor also keeps a local copy in your browser as you type, in case the tab closes unexpectedly.
- Press Prepare to publish. The drop is saved as a draft and the Reflection moment opens.
- Wait out the delay, if you set one.
- Press Publish. The drop is published and dated at that moment, not at the moment you wrote it.
After publishing
A published drop can be edited, archived or deleted from its own page. Archiving is a soft removal: the drop disappears for everyone else and stays visible to you with an archived mark. An imported guest thought begins as Only me; Prepare to publish opens the same Reflection moment and applies the same publishing limits before it can appear anywhere public.
Sharing is separate from publishing. A published Drop shows a Share control on its own page; nothing opens automatically. Use it only when you choose to send the canonical link through your device, copy it, or open a network composer.
One limit is worth knowing before you rely on it: on the Free plan the body of a drop cannot be changed once it is published. Its title, tags, address and featured state stay editable, and drafts can always be edited freely.
What each plan allows