Getting started
Making an account, what the three feeds are for, and the first things worth setting before you post.
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The account
Sign up with an email address, or with Google or Apple. You choose a username, and it is the name everything else hangs off — the @handle people mention you by, and the address of your profile on the web.
A date of birth is asked for during sign-up and is not decorative: it sets whether age-restricted posts are shown to you at all. A country is asked for too, and it is used for one thing — a modest preference for posts from the same country in your recommendations, so a feed in a small language does not drown.
Three feeds, three different jobs
- Explore — posts chosen for you. It works signed out, which is why it is what the domain opens on.
- Following — only the accounts you follow, newest first. No ranking, no recommendations: if you follow ten people this is what those ten posted.
- Popular — what is being watched now, rather than what is being recommended to you specifically.
The tabs at the top of the home screen switch between them, and the app remembers which one you left on.
Worth setting before your first post
Two settings are much easier to choose now than to change later, once there is an audience watching.
The first is whether the account is private. A private account means new followers have to be approved, and your posts are only visible to the people you approved. You can switch to public afterwards, and if you do you will be asked whether to accept every pending request at the same time.
The second is the set of per-surface visibility switches under Settings → Privacy, which decide who can see your reTops, your followers and following lists, the videos you liked and the posts you saved. These are independent of each other — a public account with a private liked list is a perfectly ordinary combination.