Ardent Social

Ardent Social is where people and organisations speak for themselves, instead of only appearing next to a campaign or a listing.

If you never post, nothing else changes. Everything else on Ardent works exactly as it did.

Your handle

Everyone gets one profile at ardent.africa/@yourhandle: a person, an NGO, a company, or a claimed business listing, all in the same shape. It is how people find you, follow you, and mention you in a post. You get a handle automatically when you sign up, and you can change it in your settings.

Posting

Open Social and choose Post. You can write text, add photos, run a poll, or publish a long-form article.

If you hold a seat in an organisation, you can post as the organisation instead of as yourself. Nobody has to share a password: you post from your own account, using the permissions you already have.

Everything you publish elsewhere on Ardent, a campaign, a petition, an event, a job, reaches your followers on its own, as a card that links back to the real thing. You do not have to write a separate post about it.

Photos

You can add up to four photos to a post. They are resized on your own device before they are sent, so posting from a phone on mobile data costs you far less than the original file would.

Every photo needs a short description. It is what a blind reader hears in place of the image, and what shows if the picture fails to load. We suggest a draft you can edit, but the post will not send until each photo has one. It is a small cost to you and the difference between a usable post and an invisible one for somebody else.

Photos are checked before they reach the feed. If something is flagged, a moderator looks at it before it appears, and you are told the outcome. Anyone can report a photo they think breaks the Platform Use Guidelines.

Links and videos

Paste a link and the post shows a proper card for it: the title, who published it, and the picture, instead of a bare address.

A YouTube, Vimeo or TikTok link becomes a player you can watch without leaving Ardent. A post from X shows its actual text in an Ardent card. Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn links get a card that opens the original, because those platforms do not allow anything more.

You see the card before you post it. Paste a link and it appears in the composer, exactly as it will look once published. If you would rather the post carried the link without a card, remove it with the X above the preview and the link stays in your text as you typed it.

Nothing is loaded from the other platform until you press play. Until then the page has not told YouTube, TikTok or anyone else that you are reading it. The thumbnail you see is served by us, not by them, for the same reason.

Once the card is showing, the raw link disappears from your text. The card says where it goes, in more detail, so printing the address as well is just noise. A link in the middle of a sentence stays where you put it.

Reacting, replying, and resharing

Every post carries five things you can do with it: react, reply, repost, share, and save.

React with any of twelve reactions, not just a like. You get one per post, and choosing a second replaces the first, so the count under a post is a count of people rather than of taps.

Reply to a post, or to any reply. Conversations nest, and a long branch collapses behind a link to that reply so a thread stays readable on a phone. You can react to a reply exactly as you react to a post. A reply is only ever as visible as the post it answers: reply to something sent to followers only, and your reply is followers only too. You do not have to think about it.

Repost puts something in front of your own followers unchanged, with your name on the line above it. Quote does the same and adds your own words on top. Reposting again removes it.

Share copies a link to the post or hands it to another app. A shared Ardent link unfurls properly in WhatsApp, Slack and anywhere else that reads link previews.

Save is private. Nobody is told, and your saved posts are only visible to you.

The app composer does everything the web one does: photos with descriptions, polls, and name and topic suggestions as you type.

On a phone, three of these are quicker by gesture: hold the reaction button to pick from all twelve rather than tapping for the default, swipe a post left to save it, and swipe a conversation left in your inbox to mute the person. Photos open full screen, where you can pinch to zoom and swipe between them.

Long posts are shortened to a few lines with a Read more, so one very long post cannot bury everything under it.

You can edit a post for 15 minutes after publishing, from the more menu. Only the text: the audience and any photos stay as they are. The previous version is kept and anyone who can read the post can read it, so an edit is a correction rather than a quiet rewrite.

Every post also carries a more menu. On your own posts it offers delete, which removes the post and its replies for everyone. On somebody else's it offers report, mute the author and block the author, alongside copy link and share. The same menu is on a profile.

Deleting is permanent and it is yours to do: nobody has to approve it, and nobody is told.

Who can see what you post

You choose the audience before you send, and the choice is shown on the post itself.

Anything that is not public is not merely hidden on the page. It is absent from the public API, from search engines, and from every embed, whoever is asking.

Your follower and connection counts are shown. The connections themselves are not. There is no way for anyone, including other apps using our developer tools, to list who follows you, who you are connected to, or which communities you belong to.

Switching off discoverability in your settings removes your profile from search engines, our sitemap, our public API and any embeds, all at once.

Your profile

Your profile is what a funder, a volunteer or a journalist sees when they land on you. Four things make it work harder than a photo and a bio:

• Featured: pin up to six campaigns, petitions, events or posts to the top. They show live progress and can be acted on from where they sit, so a visitor can sign or register without hunting for the thing you wanted them to see.
• Open to: volunteering, board roles, hiring, partnerships, speaking, mentoring. This is not a badge. It filters the volunteer and jobs surfaces and the people-to-follow suggestions, so setting it is how the right people find you.
• Vouches: an organisation can vouch for you, but only if you have worked together on Ardent: they hired you, accepted you as a volunteer, you are on their staff, or you worked on a campaign or an event with them. We check the records before it publishes, and the vouch says which it was. There are no open endorsements here, because an endorsement anybody can give anybody means nothing.
• Profile views: how many people looked in the last 30 days, and whether that is going up. Only you see it.

Nobody is ever told who looked at their profile, and nobody can find out who looked at yours. We do not keep a list you could be shown, and we are not going to build one. You can read any profile on Ardent without the other person learning that you did.

Your own profile also shows you how complete it is and the single most useful thing to add next. Nobody else sees that.

Followers and following are pages. Tap the numbers on any profile to see the people. They are not indexed by search engines.

Everything on this page works the same way in the Ardent app and on the web.

Causes

A cause is what something is about: education, health, climate and environment, human rights and governance, and eight more. Every campaign, petition and event on Ardent belongs to one.

Follow a cause and its activity reaches your feed, including from organisations you have not followed yet. That is the point of it: a feed built only from people you already know is empty on your first day and stays that way until you do the work of filling it. Following a cause is one tap and fills it immediately with the thing that brought you here.

A post that reached you this way says so, on the post, in both feed views. It is capped so causes can never take more than a third of what you see: your feed stays yours.

Who follows a cause is private. The number of followers is public; the list of people is not, and neither is the list of causes you follow.

What you can do from a post

Cards for campaigns, petitions, events and jobs show where things actually stand: how much has been raised against the goal, how many have signed, how many places are left, how long there is to go.

Some of them you can act on without leaving your feed:

• Sign a petition.
• Register for a free event.
• Save a job to look at later.

Anything involving money never happens in the feed. Donate and paid tickets always open the campaign or the event, where the organiser's own payment flow lives. Ardent does not take payments on behalf of anyone.

If you have already signed, registered or saved, the button says so rather than asking again.

Making your feed yours

Every post's more menu carries three controls, and they do three different things:

• Show fewer posts like this is a nudge. You will see less from that account and that cause for a month, then it lapses. Nothing is hidden and nobody is told.
• Mute a topic for 30 days hides posts mentioning it. You can mute it for longer, or for good, from your settings.
• Unfollow stops their posts reaching you. It does not remove your connection, so you can quietly stop following a colleague and still message each other. Muting is hidden from them; unfollowing is ordinary and visible.

Mute, block and report sit below a divider in that menu, because those are about the other person rather than about your feed.

Following and connecting

Following is one-way. You see someone's public updates; they do not have to follow you back and are not asked to approve it. This is how to keep up with a cause, an NGO, or a business.

Connecting is two-way: you ask, and the other person accepts. Connections are for people you actually know, and connecting is what opens direct messages between you.

You can follow an organisation. You connect with people.

Saving posts

Save on any post keeps it on your own shelf at Saved, which is in the social navigation on every device. Nobody is told when you save something, and the list is only ever yours.

Collections are folders over that shelf, and they are optional: saving stays one tap, and if you never make a collection nothing changes. A saved post sits in at most one folder, so there is one answer to "where did I put that".

Deleting a collection never deletes what is in it. Those posts go back to being unfiled. There is no way for a tidying-up action to lose something you saved.

It is ordered by when you saved it, not when it was written, because the thing you put there last is usually the thing you are looking for.

If something you saved is later made visible to fewer people, or its author blocks you, it drops out of your saved list. It comes back if it becomes visible to you again. Saving something does not give you lasting access to it.

Mentions

Mentions collects every post where somebody tagged you, so a mention you scrolled past in your notifications is still findable a week later.

You only see the ones you are allowed to read. If somebody mentions you in a followers-only post and you do not follow them, or in a community you have left, being named in it does not let you read it.

Searching

Search sits at the top of every social page, including on a phone, and looks for people, topics and posts. Filter it to just one of those, and your recent searches appear when you tap the empty box.

Only searches you actually opened something from are remembered, not every word on the way there.

Hearing when something happens

The bell on a profile tells you when that account posts. It is separate from following on purpose: following puts somebody in your feed, the bell interrupts you. You can follow a hundred accounts and have the bell on for two.

It covers public posts only, skips replies, and groups several posts from the same account into one notification a day.

A weekly email tells you what happened to the things you committed to: a campaign you gave to reaching its goal, a petition you signed getting a response, what is new in a cause you follow. It is a report on your own choices, not suggestions.

Nothing is sent when there is nothing to say, and you can turn every one of these off individually in your notification settings.

Communities

A community is a place to gather around a cause, a place, or a trade.

Posts in a community stay in it. What you write there goes to its members and appears on the community's page, not on your followers' feeds. A public community can be read by anyone; a private one shows its name and what it is about to everybody and its posts only to members; a secret one is invisible to anyone who is not in it.

Up to three posts can be pinned to the top by a moderator, so the thing a newcomer most needs to read is not at the bottom of months of activity.

Events announced in a community appear under "Coming up", soonest first, so you can see what is on without scrolling for it.

Joining

Some communities you can simply join. Others ask, and a moderator decides. You are told either way, including when a request is declined, because waiting indefinitely on an answer that has already been given is worse than hearing no.

If you run one

Owners and moderators get a Manage screen: pending requests, the member list, and reports about posts in the community.

Roles. An owner can make somebody a moderator or another owner. A moderator can manage members but cannot change who owns the community, and the last owner cannot leave or be demoted until somebody else is made one. A community without an owner cannot admit anyone or moderate itself.

A cover and a photo. Set from Manage on the web, or straight from the community page on your phone. They belong to the community rather than to you: any moderator can change them, and they stay if you leave.

Rules. Up to ten, in the order you choose, shown on the community page. The order is what people read, so put the important one first.

Removing a post. You can take a post out of your community, and you have to say why. The author is told, in your words.

What nobody sees. There is no list anywhere of posts a community has removed. The author is told about theirs and that is where it ends.

Drafts and scheduling

Not everything is written in one sitting. Save as draft keeps a post, its photos, its poll and its audience exactly as you left them, and Drafts in the social navigation is where they wait.

Schedule sets a time for it to publish instead. It goes out on its own, whether or not you have the app open, and until then it is still a draft you can edit or unschedule.

Organisations work in campaigns rather than in moments, so this is the difference between announcing a launch at nine on a Monday and announcing it whenever somebody happened to be at a laptop.

If a scheduled post fails to publish, the draft tells you why. It does not vanish and it does not retry silently: nobody was watching when it ran, so the reason has to still be there when you come back.

A scheduled post is published by exactly the same code that publishes one you send yourself. It is not a different kind of post, and nothing about it looks different to whoever reads it.

How your posts did

Every post you publish has a View analytics option, and organisations get the same at account level. Four numbers, and they narrow:

• Reach: how many DIFFERENT PEOPLE saw it. Not how many times it appeared.
• Opened: how many of them left the feed for the thing it was about.
• Acted: how many of those signed, registered, or saved. A subset of the ones who opened it.
• Engagement: reactions, replies, reposts, quotes and saves. Events, not people, because one person can do several.

The point of that shape is that "reached 340 supporters, 22 opened the campaign, 6 signed" tells you something you can act on, and "340 impressions" does not.

We tell you what we cannot tell you. Donations, ticket sales and job applications are not attributed back to a post, because tying money to the post somebody happened to see last would be a guess dressed as a fact. The page says so in words rather than showing a zero, which would read as "nobody did it".

Messages and the Requests folder

Once you are connected with someone, you can message each other and the conversation sits in your inbox.

A message from someone you are not connected to goes to a separate Requests folder. It does not notify you, it does not interrupt you, and the sender is not told whether you have seen it.

Replying to a request accepts it and moves the conversation into your inbox. There is deliberately no decline button: a decline would tell the sender they had reached a real person, which is exactly what somebody sending unwanted messages is looking for. If you want them gone, block them.

If someone is harassing you

Mute them and you stop seeing them, quietly. Their posts leave your feed, they can still see yours, nothing is said to them, and you can unmute at any time. This is the right tool for somebody who is tiring rather than threatening.

Block them and you become mutually invisible. They cannot see you, message you, or reach you through a mention, and they are not told they have been blocked.

Report them, from the more menu on the post or on their profile. A moderator reviews the report against the Platform Use Guidelines, records the decision and the rule it relied on, and tells you the outcome. If a decision is made about YOUR account or your content, you are told that too, with the rule it relied on, whether or not you were the one who reported anything. If a decision goes against you and you think it is wrong, you can appeal, and the appeal is decided by a different reviewer from the one who made the original decision.

A report is not the only way something gets looked at. Moderators can also act on content nobody reported, which matters when an account posts the same scam twenty times and one person reports one of them. Every such decision works exactly like one that answers a report: it names the rule, it is written down, you are told, and you can appeal it.

What we can see, and what we record

Moderators can search posts, including posts that were removed or deleted, to investigate a complaint or check that a takedown was complete. Three limits on that are worth stating plainly.

Posts inside a secret community are not searchable, even by us. They can only be opened from a report about that specific post, and opening one is recorded.

Reading a post's full history is recorded. Whoever opened it, when, and the reason they gave are written to a log that moderators cannot edit or delete. We keep that record so that "who read this, and why" has an answer months later, in an appeal or a complaint.

Your private messages are not searchable at all. A reported message can be opened one message at a time, from the report about it, and never the conversation around it. Nothing on Ardent lets anybody browse your inbox.

We publish the volume and outcome of these decisions in our moderation transparency report.

Last updated: 3 August 2026