Audience Tags, Memberships, and Visibility

Where you see this in the app

You will encounter post visibility controls in the places where a creator writes or edits a post.

The main UI labels are:

This matters because visibility is not controlled by one single concept. The app combines post-specific audience tags with the viewer's relationship to the post author.

What audience tags actually do

Audience tags are the post-level labels a creator uses to narrow the intended audience for a post.

From an end-user perspective, they answer the question: who is this post for?

The practical rules are:

• if the field is left blank, the post is shared with the broadest eligible audience,
• if the field contains tags, the viewer needs a matching relationship or matching tag context to qualify,
• the tags are part of the post's access and targeting behavior, not just a cosmetic label.

You should think of them as audience filters, not as public hashtags.

Followers vs memberships vs audience tags

These terms are related, but they are not interchangeable.

A useful mental model is:

• following or joining someone creates the relationship,
• membership tags describe that relationship more precisely,
• audience tags decide which kinds of members a specific post is trying to reach.

This is why a post can be more specific than “all followers.” A creator may want one post for everyone and another only for people tagged as vip, reviewers, or another custom audience.

Mentions, replies, and visibility side effects

Audience tags are not the only feature that changes how visible a post feels.

Mentions can involve other users in a post, but the mentioned user may still need to approve how that mention appears on their side.

Replies are separate posts in the thread. They do not simply inherit every meaning from the parent post. They are connected, but they still behave like their own posts.

That means a user should not assume that:

• a mention is an automatic public endorsement,
• a reply is merely a comment without its own post identity,
• changing audience tags is the only thing that affects how a post is experienced.

What viewers should expect

When a post uses audience restrictions, the important outcome for the viewer is straightforward: access depends on their current relationship to the author and whether they qualify for the targeted audience.

In practice, that means:

• some posts will appear broad and public,
• some posts will feel membership-oriented,
• some posts will only make sense once the viewer has the right audience tag or collaborator status.

If a creator wants simple behavior, leaving Audience tags empty is the least restrictive option. If they want targeted behavior, they should treat the field as a deliberate access and relevance control, not just as metadata.