Three frontends, one chain
None of these is a real product and none is a portrait of one. They are ours, invented, and built to answer a question that sounds rhetorical until you watch it happen: if every application writes to the same chain, why does none of them show you what the others wrote?
Each declares two things. The object types it renders at all, and the attributes it reads out of them. Nothing coordinates those choices: the three never meet and share no code, and they still end up reading each other, because meaning was in the objects the whole time.
What they are reading is inference: rules that work out what a post is from where it sits and what shape it has. That is how four years of Hive gets read at all, and it is also its limit. These three agree about title and media because everybody has those. Nothing here can tell them what a cooking application meant by a number, because nothing in a post says. That is what the register is for, and none of these three consults it yet.
- 01Pulsea public timelineEverything short, from everywhere, in one place.renders MicroPostreads body, author, media
- 02Inkwella longform readerLong pieces, room to breathe.renders Articlereads title, body, media, author
- 03Mosaica picture gridIf it has a picture, it belongs here.renders Article, MicroPost, Commentreads media, author, body
Everything they show is read from a public Hive node by the browser you are reading this in. No account, no key, no server of ours in the path. That is not a cost saving, it is the claim: if this site went dark, the same requests would still answer.
One more, and it is a different kind of thing: what a post looks like when an application encrypts the body before publishing it, and says so in an attribute. Encrypted and read back live in your own browser, with the secret written into the page on purpose.