Skip to main content

Moments

On Main's World, a post is called a moment: a short caption and/or a photo or video, recorded where you are and when you are. (The whole app has a 90s home-video feel, so expect cassettes and rewind buttons everywhere you look.)

Every moment has a place and a time​

Two things make a moment different from an ordinary post:

  • Where. A moment is anchored to the spot on the map where it was recorded.
  • When. A moment remembers the time it happened, not just the place.

A moment also records the name of the place, not only the point on the map: the city and the country it was recorded in, worked out once when you post it. That is what lets the app say a moment happened in Lisbon rather than only at a pair of coordinates. If nothing can name the spot — far out at sea, or somewhere genuinely remote — the moment simply has no name attached, and is counted as an unknown location rather than guessed at.

That's why Main's World is a map you can travel through. The rewind button at the bottom of the screen unfolds a tape deck — playback controls for the map itself. Drag the dial (or press anywhere on its timeline) to scrub back through time, skip from moment to moment, or jump straight back to the very first one; eject and you're back at now. The app calls all of this time travel, marked ◀◀: revisit what happened somewhere earlier — your own story, and the shared story of a place.

What the shared totals show​

Main's World keeps a page of community totals, and two of them are drawn from where and when moments happen: a dotted map of the world, and a grid of the week.

Both are deliberately coarse, because they count moments from every world — including the ones that are not public.

  • The world map is drawn in cells several hundred kilometres across. A lit cell says a moment exists somewhere in that quarter of a continent, and nothing narrower than that.
  • The week grid has one cell per hour of each weekday: a hundred and sixty-eight buckets covering every moment ever recorded.

At that size neither can describe a person or point at a place. The totals are a picture of the community, not a record of anybody in it. The city and country lists work the same way — they are counts, never a list of who was where.

The hours are read in the local time of wherever each moment was recorded, so the grid shows when people actually go out and record something, rather than where in the world they happen to live.

Browsing a busy corner of the map​

Where several moments share a spot, the map gathers them into a small stack of photo cards with a count of how many are inside. Tap a stack and the map glides closer while the feed opens, listing just the moments in that stack. One more tap opens a moment itself, and the map flies to where it was recorded behind it; closing the moment returns you to the list. Browsing a busy corner feels like flipping through a box of photos, not scrolling a feed.

Finding a moment​

The bar at the bottom of the app holds three things: moments, the camera button, and vibes. Tapping moments slides up a list of everything you're allowed to see, newest first, across all three privacy worlds and any visible external-app sources.

Search sits at the top of that list. Type a word and the list keeps only the moments whose label contains it. You are only ever searching what you could already see.

The list also groups itself. Whatever is around you rises to the top under a NEARBY heading, and everything else sits below it under GLOBAL. Folding the nearby group away is the quick route down to the rest of the world. Nothing is hidden by this — it is an ordering, not a filter — and when everything happens to be in one group or the other, there are no headings at all.

Narrowing what you see​

The world filters in the top right corner let you independently show or hide SKY, LAND, and DEEP moments. More settings narrow what is on screen:

  • Whose moments you see — everyone, the Mains you've connected with, the Mains you follow, or only your own.
  • Whether moments that arrived from another app count. RunPal is live; more app connections are planned.

These narrow the map as well as the list, so the pins thin out to match what you asked for. A moment that a setting filters out becomes an anonymous dot, so the map still shows that something is there without revealing it. Excluding content from another app changes only the current view; it does not change the moment's privacy, app connection, or published record.

Your choices are remembered on your device, so things open the way you left them. When something is narrowed the filter control carries a mark saying so, so a short list always explains itself — and setting "whose moments" back to everyone widens it again.

How long a moment stays on the map​

The map shows what's current, not everything that ever happened. A moment stays on the map for 60 days, and appreciation keeps it around longer: each thumbs up a moment collects adds about half a day to its stay, up to a maximum of 120 days for the most loved ones.

A moment never dims early. It looks just as bold on its last day as on its first, and only in its final half hour does it quietly fade out.

Leaving the map is not being deleted — the moment keeps its place and its time, and time travel will always find it. Rewind to when it was fresh, and it's right there again.

Throwbacks​

Not every moment gets recorded the instant it happens. A throwback is a moment you post from your photo gallery after the fact. It keeps things honest: the timestamp is when the photo was actually taken, not when you posted it, and the moment wears a small ◀◀ THROWBACK marker so no one mistakes it for a live one. Time travel to the day it happened and it's there, in its place.

Its stay on today's map is measured from when the photo was taken, the same clock as its timestamp — so a throwback of a photo from years ago is not on today's map at all. It lives where it belongs, on the map of the day it happened.

You don't have to go looking for it. When you post a throwback, the map rewinds itself to the photo's date and flies to its spot, so the new moment is right there in front of you. The rewind button turns red while you're away from now, and the clock in the corner of the map shows the date you're looking at; tap the rewind button to eject back to now. If the photo is older than the map's window, the app says so before you post, so nothing comes as a surprise. And if the post doesn't go through and you dismiss the error, the map comes back to now on its own.

What can go on the public world​

Posting to SKY puts a moment in front of everyone on Main's World, so a check runs before it lands there. It looks at whether the moment suits a public, all-ages map, and it turns away the things you'd expect: explicit content, hate, graphic violence.

Only the public world is checked. Posting to your connections (LAND) or keeping a moment private (DEEP) doesn't go through any of this — those are yours, and they always accept what you give them.

Once in a while the check can't run at all. When that happens a public post is refused rather than waved through, and the app asks you to try again. It's the cautious way round, and it never touches your other two worlds.

Real photographs, not generated ones​

Main's World is a map of things that actually happened, somewhere, to a real person. A picture made by an image generator rather than a camera isn't that, so we try to keep generated images off the public map.

Two things help. The first is what a photo says about itself: many image generators attach a small record to every file they make, called Content Credentials — a note tucked inside the image describing how it was produced. If that note says the picture was generated, the app tells you before you post, and the moment won't go to the public world.

The second is the check above, which also forms a view on whether a picture looks generated. It only acts when it's confident. A real photograph is always the assumption, and anything uncertain is treated as real.

Your moment isn't lost. A photo that can't go to the public world can still be posted to your connections or kept private. Nothing is deleted, and posting it somewhere else costs you nothing extra.

What this can and can't do​

We'd rather be straight about the limits than overstate them.

This catches pictures that identify themselves, and pictures that are obviously generated. It does not catch everything. Anyone determined to get a generated image onto the public map can strip the note out of the file and choose a picture that doesn't look obviously made — and there's no reliable way to tell from the picture alone.

The reverse is worth saying too: there's no way to prove a photograph did come from a camera. An image with no Content Credentials attached tells us nothing either way, and a missing note is never treated as a reason to doubt a photo. Most cameras don't add one.

So this is a filter, not a guarantee. It makes the public map meaningfully cleaner. It doesn't make it certain.

A check like this can also be wrong in the other direction, and a real photograph of yours could occasionally be turned away from the public world. If that happens, the moment is still yours — post it to your connections, or keep it private.

Appreciation, not likes​

Instead of "likes," Main's World has appreciation. An eligible first thumbs up on a moment mints 1 $MAIN shared by its author and tagged Mains, excluding the voter. There is no downvote: if a moment isn't for you, you simply move on. You can take a thumbs up back at any time and give it again later, and you can even give one to your own moment — though appreciating your own work never pays you anything. If other Mains are tagged, they may still receive the split.

You can also comment on a moment, and comments can collect a thumbs up of their own. The first thumbs up from another Main mints 1 $MAIN to the commenter. Comments follow the moment's world, so a comment on a private moment stays as private as the moment itself.

To learn what a thumbs up actually gives someone, read The economy.

Sharing a moment outside​

Every moment can be shared as a link. A public (SKY) moment's link opens for anyone, since the moment was public to begin with.

For a moment in LAND or DEEP, sharing it as its author creates a special link — a web link that lets anyone watch that one moment in any browser, no World App and no account needed. It's view-only, and you can revoke it whenever you like from the moment's edit screen, which instantly kills every copy of the link. The details live in the worlds & privacy.

Next: Vibes — when moments become a gathering.