Grilled Cheese User Guide

Everyone is asked. State and local law require us to confirm your age before you can use Grilled Cheese, and your date of birth is how we do that. You must be at least 18.

The year is usually all you need to give. Where month and day are needed as well, those fields appear. The check happens on your device, and your date of birth is never sent along with an email address.

What comes after the age check depends on whether Grilled Cheese is open to new people right now. You will see exactly one of these doors:

Joining the waitlist stores your email address and nothing else. It does not create an account, and asking again with the same address is harmless: the answer is the same confirmation, and you keep your place in line.

If the app cannot reach Grilled Cheese to ask which door applies, it shows the most open one and lets the server sort it out when you act. A closed gate stays closed either way; you are simply told when you try, not walled out by a hiccup.

The account made by Create Account or Look around first is a real one, with an identity and a live session, and no email address attached yet. You can:

What you cannot yet do is anything that puts you into the world: posting, replying, direct messages, and changing your profile or settings all need a verified way to reach you.

The first time you try to post, Grilled Cheese asks for an email address or a phone number, not before. The prompt is Verify your account, and it says the important part plainly: you keep this account and everything you have liked. Verifying is not starting over.

Give an email address and choose Email me a code, or a phone number and Text me a code, then enter the code that arrives. That is the whole flow, and still no password. Not now backs out and leaves you browsing.

Once verified you can post, reply, message, and edit your profile, and your follows and likes from before are all still there.

Already have an account? Log in at the bottom of the first screen takes you to the sign-in form, which accepts your email address and password. If you would rather not type a password, or never set one, Sign up: email me a code sends a one-time code to an address that already exists and signs you in with that. While sign-ups are paused, a new address entered there joins the waitlist instead, with the same confirmation.

A Grilled Cheese account is not the same thing as a Grilled Cheese identity, and the difference matters early.

The account is you: one login, one set of security settings, one age check. An identity is a presence: a handle, a profile, followers, posts. Your account is created with one identity, and you can add more at any time; free accounts get five in total.

When you create an identity you choose two things:

Together they make your handle, which has two forms because Grilled Cheese is reachable from two networks:

You do not have to pick one. Both work, both point at the same identity, and the app shows you which networks an account is reachable on wherever that matters.

See Identities for what identities are for and how to switch between them.

Four destinations, always in the same order:

Tapping Home when you are already on Home scrolls the timeline back to the top and refreshes it, the standard gesture and the fastest way to catch up.

The round button in the middle of the bottom bar starts a new post. Its icon changes to match what you are looking at: a camera in photo mode, a camcorder in video mode, a pencil in text mode. See Posting for what each one opens.

The left end is the Grilled Cheese mark; tapping it opens the menu. The right end carries the feed switcher (see Feeds) and an overflow menu.

The top bar retracts as you scroll down and comes straight back when you scroll up. One upward flick restores it, wherever you are in a long timeline. Switching tabs always brings it back, so you can never end up on a screen with no way out. The bottom bar does not hide.

Tapping the Grilled Cheese mark in the top-left opens the menu, which holds the things that are not frequent enough to earn a place in the bottom bar.

At the top is the identity you are currently posting as: avatar, full handle, and follower and following counts. Tapping it opens your profile. The double-arrow button beside it opens the identity switcher. See Identities.

Below that:

On a tablet, a desktop, or a phone held sideways, the frame changes shape: the bottom bar becomes a navigation rail down the left edge, and the timeline becomes a centred column with hairline borders rather than running the full width of the display.

If you would rather it did not, because a frame that reshapes itself mid-read is disruptive, turn on Settings → Appearance → Lock vertical layout. That keeps the single-column layout at any width and stops a phone from rotating at all. Full-screen photos and videos are the deliberate exception: they still rotate, because a video that has taken over the screen is the one place a sideways phone is the point.

Every identity has two sources of content:

If you follow nobody yet, Home shows you Discovery. A new account is not an empty room.

The bubble switch at the right end of the top bar chooses what kind of thing the feed shows you. Every option is visible at once, with the one you are on highlighted, so you can always see where else you could go.

The switch only appears on Home. On Explore, Alerts, and Profile it would be steering a screen you are not looking at, so it is hidden there.

The compose button changes with the face you are on: a camera in Photos, a camcorder in Videos, a pencil in Text and Everything. Whatever you are looking at, the button makes more of it.

A text cell shows the author’s display name, their handle, and when it was posted, then the body, then a row of actions:

Tapping anywhere else on the cell opens the thread.

The repost button does not repost on the spot. It opens a chooser with three ways to pass a post on, because they say quite different things.

Pull down from the top of the timeline to refresh. Tapping Home in the bottom bar while already on Home does the same and returns you to the top.

Grilled Cheese keeps the last feed it loaded. Open the app with no connection and you get that cached timeline with a banner saying so, rather than an error page. Anything you post while offline waits in an outbox and goes out when the connection comes back.

The pencil opens a rich-text composer. Beyond plain text you can:

A post can carry a content warning: it shows its label and stays covered until a reader chooses to open it. See Content warnings.

The camera opens a camera-first flow with four steps:

For a photo that is not square you also choose how it sits in the square feed cell: Crop centres and fills it, Fit shows the whole frame letterboxed. Opening the photo full-screen always shows the whole frame either way.

Alt text is the description of a photo that a screen reader reads aloud in place of the image. It is worth the ten seconds.

Every photo you attach carries an Alt button in its corner, in both the text composer and the photo composer. Tap it to open the description editor. The photo sits at the top and the whole page scrolls, so it moves out of the way as you write and comes back when you scroll up. There is room for a few sentences, and a counter holds you to 1500 characters, the length that travels intact to other servers. Descriptions are plain text, because plain text is how they are read out.

With several photos attached, each one gets its own description. The arrows at the bottom of the editor move between them and nothing you have typed on the way is lost. Saving writes them all at once, and leaving without saving keeps every photo as it was.

While a photo has no description, a reminder sits under the attachments. It is a suggestion and never blocks a post. If you would rather not see it, turn Alt text reminder off under Settings, Accessibility.

The camcorder opens Grilled Cheese’s capture flow, and it is deliberately unlike a normal video recorder: square only, ten seconds maximum, and recording runs only while your thumb is on the button.

Press and hold to record. Lift to pause. Move the camera, press again. Each press is a segment and the segments run together, so a cut happens the instant you lift your thumb. The whole edit is made while shooting, and there is nothing to assemble afterwards. The bar across the top of the viewfinder shows the segments you have and how much of the ten seconds is left.

If you would rather post video you already have, the text composer takes an attachment from your library.

A thread is several posts written in one sitting and published in order as one chain. You build it in the ordinary composer, one message at a time.

Each queued message keeps a position chip, 1/2 and so on, so you can see the running order. To drop one, use the X beside it; remove the last queued message and the composer returns to writing a single post.

Any post can be scheduled instead of published. Scheduled posts collect under Settings → Scheduled posts, where you can edit the time, post one immediately, or delete it before it goes.

Mark as sensitive in the composer opens two controls, and they do different jobs.

Warning text on its own is enough. A post with warning text is marked sensitive whether or not you also chose a type, which is how a content warning behaves on Mastodon, and it saves you setting two controls to mean one thing.

A warning is set when you post. Editing a post does not yet add or remove one.

In a thread the warning belongs to the message you attached it to rather than to the whole chain, so one message can be covered and the rest left open; see Posting a thread. A reply carries one exactly like a top-level post, and so does a quote post.

A covered post shows the author, the warning text, the label, and Tap to view. The label names the type: Sensitive: nudity, Sensitive: sexual content, Sensitive: violence, or plain Sensitive content when there is no type. Photos and video sit behind a blur rather than collapsing. Revealing one post reveals that post and nothing else, so the next one is still covered.

How much sensitive content reaches you at all is yours to set. Under Settings > Content preferences, Sensitive content offers Less, Standard, and More. It governs people you do not follow: a sensitive post from a profile you follow arrives in your feed like any other post. See Content preferences.

The two are easy to confuse, and they work in opposite directions.

Use a warning when you want other people to choose. Use a hidden word when you never want to see the thing again. Hidden words live under Content preferences with everything else that is yours alone.

AI-generated is a label too, and it behaves the opposite way from a warning. It is always visible and it covers nothing, because the entire point of a disclosure is that people see it.

It is the author’s to set. Grilled Cheese staff can neither add one to your post nor take yours away, because whether you used a machine to write something is a statement about your own work rather than a judgment anyone else gets to make for you.

Much of what you read comes from Bluesky and from the fediverse, and both carry labels of their own. Grilled Cheese honours them rather than deciding again.

The source network stays in charge of its own labels. If the author or the moderation service removes a warning there, it clears here the next time we see the post.

For what happens in the other direction, when a warning you wrote travels outward, see Content warnings across the networks.

Grilled Cheese does not carry adult content today. Plainly, and without qualification, because people plan around this:

This is a stage rather than a settled position. It holds until age verification ships. After that, adult content becomes a label instead of a removal: shown only to readers who have verified they are over 18 and who have turned it on, and off by default for everyone else. App store rules mean that switch will live on the Grilled Cheese website rather than inside the app.

Every post has Report in its overflow menu, and unlabelled adult content is one of the reasons you can choose. Use it. An unlabelled post is exactly the case a reader can see and a server cannot.

On a Grilled Cheese post, a moderator can add or clear the sensitive flag. That is the whole of what they can change. Your words, your warning text, and your AI-generated label are never rewritten by staff; a post that breaks the rules is taken down rather than quietly edited.

On a post from another network, the labels belong to that network. Moderators here can hide it from Grilled Cheese and no more than that, because the copy living on the source server is not ours to relabel.

Settings > My reports shows what you sent and what came of it; see Reporting and moderation.

The author decides. When composing, who can reply offers everyone, only people you follow, or only people you mention. A reader who is outside that set sees the thread but not the reply box, with a line explaining why.

A thread is several of your own posts published in order as one chain. You build one in the composer with Add to thread rather than by replying to yourself after the fact. See Posting a thread.

More (…) → Bookmark saves a post to read later. Bookmarks live in the menu, and you can sort them into collections rather than leaving them in one pile.

Under the Edit profile button sits a small badge naming the networks this identity is reachable on: ATProto + ActivityPub for a Grilled Cheese identity. On someone else’s profile it tells you where they actually live, which is what decides whether a given interaction will reach them.

Edit profile changes the display name, the bio, the avatar, the banner, and the links shown on the profile. Avatars and banners get a crop step so you control the framing rather than accepting a centre crop.

Changing your username is separate, under Settings → Account, because it changes your handle, the address other people use to find you.

The same layout, with Follow in place of Edit profile. The overflow menu holds Add to List, mute, block, and report.

If an account is private, its header still shows name, avatar, counts, but its posts are replaced by a line saying the account is private, and Follow becomes a request the owner has to approve.

The QR button in the profile app bar shows a code for this identity that another phone can scan to land straight on your profile. The scanner is on Explore.

Lists in the menu shows the lists you have made, newest first. The + button makes a new one. A list has a name and, if you want one, a description saying what it collects.

The overflow menu on a row edits that name and description, or deletes the list. Deleting a list deletes only the list: the accounts that were in it are untouched, and you stay following whoever you were following.

Open a list to see who is in it. The add person button at the top asks for a handle or an address, and takes any of the forms an account can be addressed by:

This is deliberately typed rather than picked from a menu of people you follow. You do not have to follow somebody to keep them in a list, and the account you want may be somewhere you have never visited. If the address does not resolve to a real account, the app says so and leaves what you typed in the box to fix.

Each row in a list has a remove button. Removing somebody from a list does not unfollow them.

The quicker route, and the one most people use: open the account’s profile, tap the overflow menu, and choose Add to List.

The sheet lists every list of yours with a tick against the ones that already hold this account, so you can see at a glance where they are filed. Ticking a list adds them, unticking removes them. New list at the top makes a list and puts them in it in one go, which is how most first lists get made.

Add to List and Add to Starter Pack are separate entries in that menu, and they do different jobs. A list is a private grouping you keep for yourself. A starter pack is something you hand to other people.

A list you have opened has Follow everyone along the bottom. It follows every account in the list in one action.

It asks before it does it, and tells you how many accounts that is, because it is a lot of following at once and there is no single undo for it. Anyone you already follow is left alone, and so is anyone you have blocked. When it finishes, it reports how many people it newly followed, how many you were already following, and how many it skipped.

A list is not a feed. There is no timeline of posts from the accounts in a list, and the app does not offer one, because there is nothing behind it yet. What a list gives you today is the grouping itself, the ability to add anyone from anywhere, and the ability to follow the whole group at once.

Muting or filtering by list is also not available. A list has no effect on what you see; it only records who is in it.

Curated lists on Explore are the same kind of object, assembled by Grilled Cheese rather than by you. You can follow everyone in one of those the same way, but you cannot edit it, because it is not yours.

The double-arrow button beside your handle in the menu opens the switcher. Choose an identity and the whole app reloads as that persona: its feed, its notifications, its settings, its drafts.

The identity you are currently acting as is shown in the menu at all times, because posting as the wrong one is the mistake this design has to prevent.

New identity in the switcher asks for two things: a username, and the domain it lives on. Grilled Cheese serves several domains, and the identity’s handle is the two together. On a server with only one domain, the choice does not appear.

Pick carefully. The handle is the address people use to find you. It can be changed later, under Settings → Account, but anyone holding the old one will have to be told.

The split is what lets one identity be private while another is public, and what makes a change to your password protect all of them at once.

An organization can point a domain it owns at Grilled Cheese. Once the domain is validated, the organization can grant identities on it, [email protected], to member accounts. Those work exactly like any other identity: the member switches to it, posts from it, and keeps it separate from their personal presences.

One identity, two ways to be reached, and both are real:

This is deliberate rather than a quirk. The two networks were designed with different addressing, and there is no single string that works on both. The app shows you the right form wherever it matters, and the badge under your profile name says which networks an identity is reachable on; see Profiles.

Search for them and follow them. That is the whole of it.

Explore’s People tab searches accounts on the other networks as well as this one, so a Bluesky handle like name.bsky.social or a fediverse address like @user@host finds the person; see Explore. Following works the same way whichever you typed, their posts land in Following alongside everyone else, and one list can hold accounts from all three networks at once; see Lists.

Follows travel in both directions. Someone on Mastodon can follow you without an account here, and their follow arrives in your notifications like any other. On a private identity it arrives as a request you approve; see Private accounts and the other networks.

Following is straightforward: it is the accounts you followed, wherever they live.

Discovery and the Everything face are wider than that. Grilled Cheese reads a live stream of public posts from the Bluesky network, the firehose, and indexes what comes past. Fediverse posts arrive a different way, because ActivityPub has no firehose: they are delivered to us because somebody here follows the author, or pulled in when somebody here opens their profile. Everything sits in one pool, and the Everything face is that pool in time order with nothing filtered out by kind. See Feeds.

Two things shape what reaches the pool at all:

The Bluesky firehose used to be filtered on the way in, and only English and Spanish posts were kept. That limit is gone: the pool now stores every language, so what you see is no longer narrowed by a decision made here.

Three separate settings get confused with each other:

If you do not declare a language, Grilled Cheese uses your device’s language for a post that has text in it, and sends nothing at all for a post that is only media. It never guesses from the words themselves. A guess would travel outward as a claim you never made, and a wrong claim is worse than silence.

Replying to a Bluesky post or a Mastodon post works the same way as replying to anything else, and your reply is delivered to the author’s server. Likes and follows cross too.

Threading is where it frays. A conversation stays properly threaded within one network, but a reply whose parent came from the other network can lose its place in the chain. If a thread looks like it has holes in it, that is usually what happened rather than something you did.

Reposts and reactions do not survive the crossing intact, and the table below says how.

A warning you put on a post travels, but the two networks carry different parts of it. See Content warnings for what a warning is and how to add one.

The type is carried as a self-label, so the post arrives covered and Bluesky’s own settings apply to it. The warning text you wrote is not carried. Bluesky has nowhere to put it. Readers there see that the post is labelled, not what you said about it. Other and untyped warnings go out as graphic-media, which is the label that covers a post without asserting anything about what is in it.

Both parts are carried, in exactly the shape Mastodon uses: the post is marked sensitive and your warning text becomes the summary shown in its place. This is the network where a warning arrives whole.

Only public posts federate. A post limited to your followers or to people you mention stays here, unless your whole identity is private, which changes things again; see Private accounts and the other networks.

Everything below is about a public post.

Some things are deliberately not on either protocol, and it is worth saying so because people assume otherwise.

Settings > Sharing across networks has one switch per network, both on by default. An identity can federate to both, to one, or to neither; see Settings.

Turning one off stops new posts and reposts going out to that network. What is already out there stays out there, and an edit you make afterwards is not sent, so remote copies of old posts go stale where they are.

Two things still happen with a switch off, on purpose:

The switch stops new sharing. It never stops a retraction, because a retraction is the thing you would most want to work.

It also does not take you off the network. Your profile is still served, people can still follow you, and follows, likes, and profile changes are unaffected. It governs the posts you share, not whether you exist.

A move carries your DID, your public record history (posts, likes, follows, lists), your images and video stills, and your Bluesky app preferences. It does not carry direct messages or chats (those never leave the server that holds them), server side feed placements, or your handle. Handles belong to domains: an identity arriving here takes a name.grilledcheese.app handle, and one leaving takes whatever handle the new provider offers. If you own a custom domain handle, you keep it when you leave, since the domain is yours rather than any server’s. Arriving here currently means taking a grilledcheese.app handle even if your old one was a custom domain; support for using your own domain here is planned.

Grilled Cheese speaks the standard migration flow, so the usual tools work. With goat, the whole move is one command. Log in with your full password (not an app password), request the identity code, then migrate:

When it finishes, sign out of your apps and back in. Two caveats worth knowing: migration respects the same door as sign ups, so if sign ups are closed to the public your move lands on the waitlist rather than completing, and some providers rate limit image downloads, so a large account can take a while.

Your identity is portable in both directions, and leaving needs no permission from us. The one prerequisite is a verified email address on your account, because the confirmation code that authorizes the identity change is sent by email. An anonymous account has to add one first, under Settings > Account.

The destination’s own tooling or goat both work. From the command line, the sequence is the usual four phases, with Grilled Cheese as the old server:

Until the identity change in phase 3 is submitted, nothing is final, and you can abort by simply reactivating here. After you leave, your old account on Grilled Cheese deactivates: it stops accepting writes and stops appearing in feeds, while the network is given a grace period to finish syncing from the new home.

The button at the right of the search box opens the code scanner. Point it at another phone showing a Grilled Cheese identity code and you land on that profile. It is the fastest way to follow somebody standing in front of you.

Explore also surfaces starter packs: hand-assembled groups of accounts on a theme, which you can follow individually or all at once. They are how a new account gets a feed worth reading before it has found anyone.

Curated lists work the same way but stay useful after onboarding: a list has members, a description, and a preview of who is in it, and following the list follows what it collects.

Tapping a hashtag anywhere in the app opens its own timeline. From there you can follow the hashtag, and its posts start appearing in your feed the way an account’s would.

Settings → Notifications turns each kind on or off independently: mentions, replies, reactions, follows, direct messages, and channel posts. The preference belongs to the identity, so a work persona can notify on mentions only while a personal one notifies on everything.

Turning a kind off means the alert is never recorded at all, not merely that it stays quiet. Nothing collects in the background waiting for you to turn it back on, and turning it on again does not backfill what you missed. That is worth knowing before switching one off: it is a decision about what you want to know, not about when you want to be told.

If your identity is private, follows arrive as requests rather than notifications you can only read after the fact. They collect in their own screen, reachable from your profile, where each one can be approved or denied.

Account gathers everything that belongs to you rather than to a persona.

The identity these apply to is named at the top of the section, with a Switch button so you can change which one you are configuring without leaving the screen.

These are not synced. Signed in on a phone and a laptop, each keeps its own.

The screen shows a monthly and an annual price, and you buy through the App Store or Google Play. Because the store owns the subscription:

If you subscribe annually, Grilled Cheese emails you a reminder three days before the subscription renews.

Once it is active, the screen says so instead of showing prices.

The app ships with nine built-in theme families, and every account can switch between them under Settings → Appearance. Each family has a light and a dark variant, shown as the pair of swatches beside its name, and the app follows whichever your device is set to.

Premium adds the ability to make your own.

Premium does not affect what other people see, how your posts are ranked, or who can reach you. There is no Premium badge on your profile, and no priority in anyone’s feed. It raises your own limits, and that is all.

Conversations in the menu holds private messages. They are end-to-end encrypted: Grilled Cheese’s servers carry the messages but cannot read them.

A conversation can be one-to-one or a group. Group membership is managed from the conversation’s info screen, where you can add people, see who is in it, and leave.

Because the encryption is real, a few things follow that do not apply to a normal chat app:

Conversations belong to the identity you are using, like everything else.

Every post and every account has Report in its overflow menu. A report asks what is wrong and lets you add context.

Settings → My reports shows what you have sent and what came of it. Reports go somewhere and you can see where. Settings → Moderation record is the other direction: your own standing, and every action taken against the account, with an explanation rather than a silent penalty. One record covers all identities on the account.

Between muting, blocking, hidden words, and content labels there is a lot of ground between "see everything" and "report it". See Content preferences for the controls, and Content warnings for what the labels mean and how to report a post that should have carried one.