Hacienda 1.7

This week is about the public side of your space — what shows, where it shows, and the controls for deciding that. (How public should a DFOS be? — Yancey's post from Monday is good companion reading.)

Here's the rundown for Hacienda 1.7.

Public sites

Spaces can now have a public site at their own address — yourspace.dfos.com. It's a front page for your space: your public long posts, your space's identity and description, and a way in for new people. Try checking this space’s front page to get the idea: home.dfos.com

It's off by default and you turn it on from Studio. The site only ever shows what you've already marked public — turning it on doesn't change the visibility of anything. Folded posts show what's above the line; reading further means signing in.

Spaces can also add pages to their site — starting with an About page — for the things you want to say that aren't posts.

A public site doesn't make your space public. The space stays whatever it is — closed spaces stay closed, and everything inside the boundary stays inside. Visitors see the posts and pages you chose, your space's name and description, and a rough sense of scale — "dozens of members," never exact numbers and never who they are. They don't see member lists, activity, or view stats (those are yours, in Studio). And a space without a public site is indistinguishable from a space that doesn't exist.

So the dark forest nature of your space doesn't change. The site is a surface in front of it — a place where the things you choose to put out can grow in the open and lead the right people toward the door.

This starts with posts, but we're looking at more ways to choose what a space makes public — media, products, calendar events — surfaced in similar ways. And more control over how the front page itself looks and is arranged.

Visibility & sharing

Every post now has a Visibility & sharing panel where all of this lives in one place. Two new things in it:

Public topics — set a topic to public and its posts become part of your public site, including posts already in it that are on default visibility. (Posts with their own explicit visibility setting keep it.) Useful for the parts of your space that are meant to face outward, so you're not deciding post by post.

Secret links — create a link that lets anyone who has it read the post, without an account. If the post has a fold, the link shows what's above it. Each post has one live link at a time, and revoking it shuts it off immediately.

None of the ways a post travels change what it actually is. A secret link doesn't make a post public — it only works for whoever has the link. Sending a post as a newsletter doesn't make it public either — your subscribers can read what you sent them, and that's it. The only thing that makes a post public is you marking it public.

Pay-what-you-want

Store items and space keys can now be priced pay-what-you-want. You can set a minimum or leave it open, and buyers choose the amount at checkout. This sits alongside free and fixed pricing on everything you sell.

Link cards

DFOS links pasted into a post now render as cards — or small inline chips within a sentence — showing the title and art of the post, space, event, or profile they point to.

Cards respect visibility: they only show what the person viewing them has access to.

DFOS API

There's now a public API at api.dfos.com. It serves the same content as public sites — public posts, pages, topics, and profiles — in a machine-readable form, no authentication required.

This is a starting point. Over time it will cover more data, and API keys and authentication are coming for more complex integrations. It's also designed to work alongside the protocol — more on that in the coming weeks.

Docs

DFOS now has a documentation site at docs.dfos.com — guides for using the platform, plus a full reference for the API above, including a quickstart and an explanation of how visibility works on the wire.

Smaller things

Post comments can now include attachments — images, video, and audio. Broadcasts show a preflight of exactly who will receive a send before you confirm, and each broadcast gets its own stats page afterward. Subscriber email addresses are verified before sending, which protects your deliverability without any work on your end.

Spaces can now add social and website links to their profiles, making it easier for members to find you across the web.

Plus mobile scroll fixes, group cleanup fixes, and public site view counts in the Studio dashboard.

More soon ✌️