how matching works

sissy-haven is the opposite of a public feed. what you post is shown to a small set of people the system picks for you — every post a small, private gift. this page explains what that means in practice — and what it can't promise.

your location

• your browser shares an approximate location with us when you allow it — or you can just pick the nearest city from a list, which is enough for matching and needs no location permission at all.
• either way we immediately snap it to a 2.5 km grid and discard the precise reading. the raw coordinates are never stored, and a picked area is stored in exactly the same form as a gps reading — we don't keep which city you chose.
• one side effect worth knowing: everyone who picks the same city ends up on the same grid square, so distances between them read as zero and the 250/1000 km floors are a little blurrier near the boundary.
• your location is never shown to other users.
• you can change or remove your location any time from settings.
• if you decline, you'll only see posts markedglobal.

how audience is picked

when someone posts, they pick a max audience size and a distance mode:

• close: the people nearest the creator. worth knowing: "nearest" has no ceiling — it ranks by distance but never rules anyone out for being too far, so a post from a quiet area can travel a long way to find its audience.
• mid: the nearest people who are at least 250 km away.
• far: the nearest people who are at least 1000 km away — far enough that you'll never cross paths.
• global: ignores location entirely and includes users who haven't shared their location.
• favorites: the creator's favorites always see it. favorites are one-way — you pick yours with the ★ in any conversation, and nobody is told they were picked.

we over-fetch by 50% and shuffle within that pool, so being included in a "close" audience does not mean you're the very closest person. it means you're among the closer half.

the inference you can still make

if you see a post tagged "close", you can reasonably guess that the creator is somewhere not-too-far from you. we can't fully eliminate this — that's the whole point of distance matching.

audience fills over time

when a creator posts with a cap of, say, 30 viewers but only 10 people qualify at the time, the post staysopen. new people who sign up afterwards (or who later add their location) get added until the cap is hit. once full, the audience is sealed and no one else can be added.

posts don't last forever

posts leave feeds after 30 days — creators can "reach more" from my posts to bring one back. and if a post picked for you sits unopened for a few days, your spot is passed on to someone else. checking in regularly keeps your spot.

media metadata

every image and video is re-encoded server-side and the originals are stripped of EXIF, GPS, device metadata, and chapter atoms before any derivative is shown to anyone.

media URLs

images and videos load from short-lived signed URLs (5 minutes). direct links won't be sharable past that window.

abuse contact

to report content, use the report link on any post or in a conversation. for everything else, emailREPLACE_ME.