Cuota will be designed to fulfill many of the typical functions of modern social media. Users will have customizable profiles and be able to push messages out to their followers, which can be grouped in a unique feature called Courts. In addition to having a feed of updates from the people you follow, you can also engage with anyone in the world through topic-specific groups and communities.
The features below are planned for the Beta launch. Additional features will come online later and can be viewed in more detail on our Roadmap.
User Posts
User posts, or “cuots”, will be able to be published directly from your profile. These will show up in the main feed for people who follow you and are part of the appropriate “Court” (see below).
A user’s posts can be interacted with in many ways. Reacts are the simplest interaction available and allow for more customized responses than a typical “like”. Users can choose from a variety of emojis to add their React to a particular post. Some of the React emojis available are: 🧊 😄 🔥 😠 🤯.
Posts can also be replied to, which will show up beneath the post, forming a conversation thread on the main post. Users can also choose to “pass along” or “cite” a particular post. Passing along a post will distribute that original post to your own followers so they can see it too, even if they aren’t following the original poster. Citing the post is similar, but will embed the original post in a post of your own, allowing you to provide additional commentary when sharing the post.
Courts
Courts are a unique feature we’re bringing to Cuota that will solve one of the many problems with modern social media. As is well-known and documented, people contain multitudes. Sometimes you won’t be interested in everything a particular person has to say on every subject. If you follow a user for their political insight and commentary, for example, you may not necessarily care as much about their thoughts on international football.
In the past, some social media networks accounted for this by allowing people to group their followers into certain buckets so they could show relevant posts to to those most interested. But this is backwards, isn’t it? How are you supposed to know what your followers like? With Cuota, followers are free to put themselves into the appropriate Courts you set up based on whatever their interests are. So if you plan on posting about politics, sports and your personal life, you could create a Court for each of these and followers can decide which of your Courts they want to join.
Courts also come with privacy protections. You can set a Court to private and control who specifically is allowed to join it. You’ll have to approve every request manually, but this ensures that only the people you trust will see the content you choose to post to that Court.
Of course you can still post your updates to everyone. Posts that aren’t assigned a Court will be viewable by anyone who follows you, as well as publicly available on your profile.
Bookmarks
Users will have access to fully customizable bookmarks. Each user will be able to create up to six bookmark lists which can be set as either public or private. Any update, thread or comment can be saved to a bookmark.
Alerts and expirations will also be built into bookmarks to help keep your bookmark lists orderly and useful. You can have certain bookmarks simply expire after a certain amount of time, making these great for public bookmark lists where you want to feature only new and up-to-date information. You can also set reminders on bookmarked items so that they will appear at a set date and time as a notification.
User Verification
Every user on the platform will be verified. This is an important security feature that will make Cuota the safest and most trustworthy social network available.
However, we understand that there are certain situations that could call for anonymity. Because of this, every user will be able to create up to three anonymous handles that can be used within Groups that allow anonymous posting. You can only operate as one of your anonymous accounts in any given group, as well as your public persona. This will mean that our users can have anonymous conversations on the platform, but will also not have to worry about “astroturfing”, a situation where many anonymous accounts by the same person push a particular opinion or agenda to give the impression there is more support for it than there actually is.
Thoughtful Moderation
Because our users will all be verified, we will have a better ability to moderate harmful content on the platform than typical social media networks. Users will not be able to simply create new accounts or use proxies to get around moderation.
Using a team of volunteer moderators as well as internal content teams, we will keep a close eye on the content being posted on our platform so we can quickly take action to remove harmful content.
Harmful content includes hate speech, harassment, misinformation and spam.
We do not believe in permanent bans because we want everyone to have the opportunity to grow and learn from their mistakes. Users may receive temporary bans based on the severity of their infraction, but the maximum amount of time a ban will last is one year. We hope that will be enough time for people to reconsider how they want to interact with the world through our platform.
Groups
Social media should always be about more than your own follower bubbles. We want to foster communities and will do so through topic-specific Groups. These will initially be limited to broad and common topics, such as World News, Television, Movies and Gaming. Later we plan to allow for user-created Groups that can be used to grow and develop specific communities around a shared interest.
Groups will all have volunteer moderators which will have to be active and abide by our moderation policies. Depending on the nature and purpose of the group, different moderator management options will be available. Some groups may organize with a more autocratic management structure, allowing moderators to make decisions for the group as they see fit, while other groups will have a democratic structure in which the community will be able to vote on specific rules and even who the moderators are.
Groups will have the option to allow for anonymous posting. This will be a group-by-group decision, and moderators will not be able to see the identity of anonymous users in the group.
Aside from the basic Reacts available on any user post, threads submitted to a group can also be voted up or down which will affect their ranking and visibility within the group. This allows for popular threads to rise to the top while suppressing threads the group is less interested in.
Direct Messages
Users may send direct messages to each other on the platform. These messages will be end-to-end encrypted. Users may also select whether or not they want messages to automatically expire and can choose a time limit for this. Any expired messages will not be kept by Cuota more than a week after their expiration. This allows us some window of time for moderation issues that could arise, such as using messages to harass another user, but will prevent us from storing your personal messages for an unreasonable amount of time.
View Roadmap for More
We have additional features planned for beyond our Beta release. These features include things like uploading video content, event listings and monetization for creators. Check out the Roadmap to see more details for what we have planned.