Stories and engagement

Posts are the long-form unit on Network. Around them sit a handful of lighter-weight surfaces — stories, likes, comments, saves, shares — that let you react and engage without writing a whole post. This article walks through each one.

Stories — quick, ephemeral updates

A story is a single photo or short video that:

• Lives at the top of the Network feed in a horizontal tray.
• Plays full-screen with auto-advance when tapped.
• Expires after 24 hours and disappears from everyone's tray.

Stories are perfect for:

• "Just unloaded — what do you think?" with a photo of stock arriving at the yard.
• A 10-second walkaround of a machine running, before the formal listing goes up.
• A quick "we're at Bauma, come find us" announcement.

The stories tray

When you open /network, the very top of the centre column shows a horizontal row of circular avatars — one per seller you follow who has at least one active story. Your own avatar appears first if you have unpublished stories or stories you've already posted today.

Tap any avatar and the story viewer opens full-screen, plays the seller's stories in order, then auto-advances to the next seller's stories. You can:

• Tap left to rewind to the previous story.
• Tap right to skip to the next.
• Hold to pause auto-advance.
• Swipe down or hit Esc to close.

A small ring around the avatar in the tray tells you which sellers still have unwatched stories — full ring = unwatched, dim = you've seen them.

Posting a story

The story creator opens from a small + badge on your own avatar in the tray (visible only to you). It accepts a photo or short video — same media constraints as posts — plus an optional caption overlay. There are no polls, no attached listings, no comments. Stories are intentionally minimal.

Once published, the story appears immediately in the trays of everyone who follows you and starts its 24-hour countdown.

You can delete your own story at any time from the viewer (the small … menu while the story is playing).

Likes — the cheap signal

Every post has a heart button. One tap toggles a like.

A few things to know:

• Liking a post sends a notification to the post's author, unless they've muted likes in their settings.
• The total like count is visible to everyone. The list of who liked it is visible only to the post author and to anyone who taps the count to open the likers modal — which respects per-user privacy where applicable.
• Likes are tracked, but they don't drive the feed order. The feed is chronological. Likes feed /explore ranking and your own Saved and History surfaces.

Liking and unliking are silent — the author won't see "X liked then unliked your post". Only the current state matters.

Comments — the conversation

Tap Comment on a post and a thread opens beneath it. Comments are:

• Public — anyone who can see the post can read the thread, including non-followers.
• Threaded one level deep — you can reply to a comment, but you can't reply to a reply. (We capped depth on purpose; deep threads stop being useful for most equipment conversations.)
• Linkified — URLs, hashtags and @handle mentions in your comment become tappable.
• Editable for a short window after posting; deletable forever by you (the comment author) or by the post author.

Comments have their own rate limits to keep spam out — fairly generous for normal use, you'll only feel them if something automated is firing.

The first-comment preview

Below every post in the feed you'll see a short preview of the first comment — author + a one-line excerpt. Tap it to expand the full thread inline without navigating away from the feed. This lets you stay in the scroll while still seeing the conversation around a post.

Reporting a comment

If a comment crosses into spam, abuse or off-topic noise, the small … menu on it has a Report option. Reports go to platform moderation; the comment is reviewed and either kept, hidden or removed. The reporter stays anonymous to the comment author.

Saves (bookmarks)

The bookmark icon on a post saves it to your /network/saved page. Saved posts:

• Are private — nobody else sees what you've bookmarked.
• Stay even if you unfollow the seller (until the seller deletes the post).
• Can be unsaved with a single tap from the same icon.

Use saves for:

• Posts that point at listings you might come back to.
• Specs or videos you want to reference when comparing machines.
• A quick "remind me of this" without commenting publicly.

Shares

The share button gives you a few ways to push a post outside of Haubot:

• Copy link — the canonical /network/post/{publicId} URL goes onto your clipboard. Anyone with the link can open the post (subject to the seller's privacy — private-profile posts only open for authorised followers).
• Share to platform — opens your operating system's native share sheet.
• Email / messaging — pre-fills a message with the link and the post's first line.

Shares don't notify the post author, intentionally — they're a private action.

Reactions on listings vs reactions on posts

Worth a brief clarification because the two surfaces look similar:

• A like on a post means I liked this update from this seller.
• A save on a listing means I'm interested in buying this machine.

They live in completely separate places — listing saves show up in your buyer dashboard's Saved listings; post saves show up in /network/saved. Don't expect a post like to surface on the listing it points to, or vice versa.

Next steps

• Creating posts — what you're engaging with.
• Notifications — how engagement turns into bell-icon activity.
• Discovery and search — how /explore uses likes and comments to surface posts to new audiences.