Public profile and Discover

Your public profile is the page at /u/<username> that lists everything you have made Public. Public items are also listed in Discover. Anyone can open them, signed in or not.

Public is one of the five visibility levels. For the others, and for link expiry and view limits, see Sharing.

Claim a usernameCopy Anchor Link

Open Settings > Public Profile, choose a username, accept the Terms of Service and claim it.

• A username is 3 to 30 characters: lowercase letters, numbers and single hyphens. It cannot start or end with a hyphen, or be only numbers.
• Some names are reserved, such as the names of Symbol's own pages and names that would pass for Symbol or an AI company. A name that looks too much like an existing username is refused too.
• A username is permanent. You cannot change it once you have claimed it, so choose carefully.
• A username can only be claimed in a browser.

Your profile is private until you turn it on.

Turn your profile on and offCopy Anchor Link

Once you have a username, Settings > Public Profile shows the Public profile switch. Turning it on needs a verified email address.

Turning your profile off unpublishes everything you have made Public. Symbol asks first and says how many items that is. When you confirm:

• their public addresses stop working, they leave Discover, and their embeds are removed;
• each item becomes Anyone with link if it still has a working share link, or Private if not;
• links you sent to people keep working.

If anything goes wrong part way, nothing changes: your profile stays public and every item stays published.

Publish an itemCopy Anchor Link

Choose Public in the Share dialog of a capsule, a Type or a Collection. Public is for your personal content: the dialog does not offer it for organization content or for projects, and encrypted content cannot be published.

If anything is missing, the dialog tells you straight away:

• No username yet: the dialog offers Claim a username to publish. Once you claim one, you come back to the capsule and it is published, with its address shown in the dialog, with no further clicks.
• Public profile off: Enable public profile & publish turns your profile on and publishes the item in one step.

An assistant gets the same answer: it can publish a capsule and tell you its address, or tell you which one-time step is missing and where to do it.

Publishing a Type or Collection publishes the capsules in it that a link would. See what a link to a Type or Collection publishes.

Your public addressCopy Anchor Link

A Public item is reachable at /u/<username>/<slug>. For a capsule the slug is its alias, and one is made from its title if it has none. For a Type or Collection it is the Type's or Collection's slug.

• An address belongs to one item, permanently. Once an item has been published at an address, no other item of yours can take it, even after the first item is made Private or deleted. So a link someone posted can only ever reach the item it was made for, or the "no longer available" page, never something else. If you publish an item whose alias another of your items already used publicly, Symbol refuses and names that item, so you can choose a different alias.
• Renaming keeps posted links working. If you rename the alias or slug of a Public item, its old address redirects to the new one. Making the item Private stops both.
• Capital letters do not matter. /u/Ada/Bio and /u/ada/bio reach the same page.

Moving an item from Public back to Anyone with link stops its address at once. Links you sent to people keep working.

DiscoverCopy Anchor Link

Every item you make Public is listed in Discover, where anyone can search, filter and sort what creators have published. Link-only, organization and private content never appears there. See Discover for searching, sorting and reporting.

LikesCopy Anchor Link

Anyone signed in to Symbol can like a capsule on its share page or its public page. Discover shows how many likes each item has. Someone who is signed out is asked to sign in first, and nothing is liked until they press the heart themselves. You cannot like your own content.

What you like goes on your Liked list. See Liked.

Follow creatorsCopy Anchor Link

People can follow you from your profile, and from the pages you share, while your public profile is on. They hear about each new item you make Public in their Inbox. See Follow creators.

Save to my accountCopy Anchor Link

Someone who opens your share link or your public page can keep a copy with Save to my account.

• The copy is theirs. It is a new capsule in their own library. In their personal workspace it starts Private.
• Where it lands. A capsule with no fields goes into their General Type. A capsule that needs its Type's shape (fields, a template, or a longer body than General allows) goes into a Type with the same shape, named like yours. Symbol makes that Type once and reuses it for later saves of the same shape. It never uses a Type they made themselves.
• Files come too. Attached files are copied into the saver's own storage and count toward their storage limit.
• They confirm first. Save stays off until they tick that they trust the author and have reviewed the content.
• Saving twice. If they already saved the capsule, the dialog says so and lets them save another copy.
• View-limited links. One visit to a view-limited link allows one saved copy of each capsule. A save made without a visit, for example from an assistant, uses one view. See Share links, expiry and view limits.

Encrypted capsules cannot be saved, and you cannot save your own capsule. Saving is limited to 20 copies an hour, and on the Free plan a saved copy counts toward the plan's capsule limit.

Choosing where a saved copy goesCopy Anchor Link

If you belong to an organization, the Save dialog has a Save to list: Personal, plus each organization you can add content to. A copy saved to an organization lands in that workspace's General Type, or in a Type of the same shape there for content with fields, and your teammates see it as they see anything new there. Organizations where you can only view content are not in the list. If you leave the choice on Personal, the copy goes to your own library.

Saving something into the workspace it already lives in does nothing, because you already have it there. Symbol offers Make a personal copy instead. See Personal copies of team content.