How your feed works

The short version

Your perso feed is strictly reverse-chronological. Newest post first, the same for everyone. We do not rank it, score it, personalise it, or use machine learning to decide its order. There is no engagement optimisation and no "for you" black box choosing what rises. If two people you follow post at the same moment, the more recent one is higher, that is the whole rule.

What decides whether a post appears

A post shows up in your feed based on three plain conditions, none of which is a popularity contest:

1. The author is a verified human. perso is a network of verified humans, so posts from unverified accounts do not enter the feed. This is a gate, not a ranking: it decides whether a post can appear, never how high.
2. Its visibility setting. Every post is public, perso-only, or private. Public posts are visible to everyone; perso-only posts are visible to verified humans; private posts are visible only to their author. Your feed respects the author's choice.
3. In your Following feed, whether you follow the author. The Following feed is the same chronological feed, narrowed to the people you follow. Follow no one and it is empty, because it is showing you exactly what you asked for and nothing else.

That is the complete list. Not follower count, not how many likes a post has, not whether the author paid, not their badge, not how "important" an account is. None of that changes your feed order.

What we deliberately do not do

We think you should know what is absent, not just what is present:

• No ranking algorithm. Your home feed is not scored or re-ordered by predicted engagement, dwell time, or any other signal. It is time, newest to oldest.
• No personalisation and no machine learning. Your feed is not tailored to a profile of you. Given the same posts, two different people see the same order. There is no recommendation model deciding what you want.
• No engagement optimisation. We do not try to maximise the time you spend or the number of times you tap. A chronological feed ends, on purpose.
• No pay-to-be-seen. Paying for membership does not lift your posts. There is no promoted reach, and there are no ads inserted into your feed.
• No ranking by status. An organisation, a verified journalist, and an individual are ordered identically. A post from an institution and a post from a first-time member, published in the same second, sort the same way. Verification decides who can post to the network, never who ranks above whom.
• No shadow ranking by likes. A post's like count does not move it up your feed. The order never even reads the like count.

The one thing that can affect what you see: safety

There is a single exception to pure chronology, and it exists only for safety. When content moderation is enforced, posts that have been removed or restricted for breaking the rules do not appear, and a small number of posts that have been formally demoted through moderation are placed below their neighbours from the same time window. This is the only mechanism that can move a post from its strict chronological position, it applies only to posts that have been through a moderation decision, and it never reorders ordinary posts relative to each other. Everything not touched by moderation stays in pure newest-first order.

Likes: what "verified" means for the count

You will see two things about a post's likes, and here is exactly what they mean:

• The public like total counts every like, from any member.
• The verified count is the subset of those likes that came from verified humans.

This split is about honest social proof, showing you how much of a post's support comes from verified people. It does not change your feed order. Verified-human likes do carry weight in one specific, separate place: Trending (below). Unverified likes still appear in the public total, but they carry no ranking weight anywhere.

Trending is a separate place you choose to visit

perso has one surface that is ranked, and it is deliberately kept apart from your feed: the Trending tab. It is not your home feed, it is somewhere you go on purpose to see what is gaining momentum.

Trending ranks posts and hashtags by recent engagement, likes, reposts, and replies within a rolling window, weighted so that newer activity counts for more. Two safeguards keep it honest:

• Only verified humans count. Engagement from unverified accounts contributes nothing to a trend, so bot activity cannot manufacture one.
• It takes a real crowd. A post has to draw genuine engagement from several distinct verified humans before it can trend, so a single account, or a small coordinated group, cannot push something up.

Trending never flows back into your home feed. Choosing to look at what is trending is different from having a machine decide what fills your timeline, and on perso those stay separate.

Why we built it this way

A feed that ranks for engagement learns to serve whatever keeps you scrolling, which is not the same as what is true, or kind, or worth your time. We would rather show you the people you chose to follow, in the order they spoke, and let you decide what matters. Verified humans, in real time, without a machine in the middle. That is the whole idea of perso, and your feed is where it is most visible.

If any of this ever stops being exactly true, this page is wrong and we want to know. You can reach us at the address in our help pages.