# Commune

> Commune turns newsletters into communities. Each newsletter has an
> archive of issues, and every issue has a chat thread attached to it, so
> the discussion lives with the article rather than in a comment box
> underneath it.

The whole of this corpus, inlined, is at
https://usecommune.com/llms-full.txt. Fetch that instead of this file if you are
answering a question rather than deciding what to read.

## Read any page as Markdown

Every public reader page is also served as Markdown. There is no need to
fetch HTML and strip it.

Add `.md` to the page URL:

- `/n/{handle}.md`: a newsletter, and its recent issues
- `/n/{handle}/archive.md`: every issue, paginated with `?page=N`
- `/n/{handle}/a/{slug}.md`: one issue: the full body AND its discussion
- `/n/{handle}/a/{slug}/chat.md`: just that issue's discussion
- `/n/{handle}/a/{slug}/chat/{replyId}.md`: one reply under an issue's discussion, and its sub-replies
- `/n/{handle}/chat/{threadId}.md`: a standalone chat thread
- `/n/{handle}/chat/{threadId}/{replyId}.md`: one reply and its sub-replies
- `/article/{uuid}.md`: an issue by id (the legacy permalink shape)

A newsletter served on its own custom domain uses the same paths without
the `/n/{handle}` prefix; its landing page is `/index.md`, since the root
has no last segment to carry the suffix.

Sending `Accept: text/markdown` to the page URL works too, and returns the
same document without the suffix. Every page that has a twin also
advertises it in a `Link: <...>; rel="alternate"; type="text/markdown"`
response header, so a client that already has the page can find the
Markdown without constructing a URL.

## What a Markdown document contains

YAML front matter, then the content. The front matter carries the title,
the newsletter, the author, the publication date, the canonical URL and
the counts, so none of that has to be inferred from prose.

An article document contains the full body followed by its discussion. In
a discussion, each reply is a heading numbered by its position in the
reply tree: `### 3` is the third top-level reply and `#### 3.2` is the
second reply to it. Message text is reproduced verbatim as posted, since
it is already Markdown.

Long discussions are capped at 500 replies, and a
document that was capped says so, in the document, with the number of
replies omitted. Nothing is truncated silently.

## What you will not get

A Markdown document is exactly what the corresponding web page would show
the same caller. Issues sent to a subscriber segment, and issues scheduled
for a future date, are not readable without the right session, in Markdown
or otherwise.

## Content

### Issues (articles)

Newsletter issues, either written on Commune or imported from Substack,
Ghost, beehiiv, Kit, Mailchimp and MailerLite.

- Canonical URL: `/n/{handle}/a/{slug}`
- Legacy permalink: `/article/{uuid}`

### Newsletters

Each newsletter has a public landing page and a full archive.

- Landing: `/n/{handle}`
- Archive: `/n/{handle}/archive`

### Chat

Discussion is threaded, and lives per newsletter. An issue's discussion is
a thread attached to that issue.

- Newsletter chat: `/n/{handle}/chat`
- A thread: `/n/{handle}/chat/{threadId}`
- A reply: `/n/{handle}/chat/{threadId}/{replyId}`
- An issue's discussion: `/n/{handle}/a/{slug}/chat`

### Profiles

Public user profiles.

- URL pattern: `/@{username}`

## The API, on another origin

Commune has a public HTTP API, and its documentation is not on this
origin. It is on a separate registrable domain, so an agent that only
crawls this host will not find it.

- [usecommune.dev llms.txt](https://usecommune.dev/llms.txt): the index for
  the API reference.
- [usecommune.dev llms-full.txt](https://usecommune.dev/llms-full.txt): every
  operation, webhook and schema, inlined as one Markdown document. Fetch
  this one to answer a question about the API.
- [Developer guides](https://usecommune.dev/guides): how to authenticate, build an
  integration, and verify a webhook signature.
- [API reference](https://api-reference.usecommune.dev): the same contract, rendered, on its
  own host.
- [openapi.json](https://api.usecommune.com/openapi.json?profile=docs): the published
  contract, as bytes to generate a client from.

The split is deliberate. Session cookie scope follows the domain and
ignores what the DNS points at, so a reference served from a
usecommune.com subdomain would receive a live session token on every
page load. A different apex cannot.

## Sitemaps

- Index: https://usecommune.com/sitemap.xml
- Static pages: https://usecommune.com/sitemap/0/sitemap.xml
- Newsletters: https://usecommune.com/sitemap/1/sitemap.xml
- Articles: https://usecommune.com/sitemap/2/sitemap.xml and upward

## Website

https://usecommune.com