Feed and Discovery

The home page of pixagram.com is a wall of artworks in one of four orders, with a personal feed for people who follow others and a page for each community. This page says where each list comes from, how it is ranked, how far back it goes, and what never appears in it. For each behaviour it says whether the rule is the chain's, the indexer's or the app's, because the answer decides who can change it.

Where the lists come from

No list is a chain fact. The chain holds posts, votes and custom_json operations; Hivemind reads them and keeps scores, follow tables and community membership; the app asks Hivemind for 20 posts at a time and filters them again on the device (Data Model).

The four sorts

The home page has four tabs. On a phone they are icons; on a computer each has its label.

A tag narrows any sort: /trending/pixelart asks for tag: "pixelart". Hivemind matches the post's tags from json_metadata and its category (Feed.js:167-168, 469-528).

The app does not expose Hivemind's other sorts, payout, payout_comments and muted, and nothing on Pixa pays to promote a post: Steem's promotion by burning SBD was dropped by Hive before Pixa forked it (From STEEM to HIVE to PIXA).

How hot and trending are ranked

Hivemind gives every root post two scores when it is created or voted on, and the Hottest and Trending tabs sort by them (hot_and_trends.sql:44-126):

rshares part = sign(r) × log10( max( |r| / 10,000,000, 1 ) )      r = the post's net rshares
hot      = rshares part + seconds since 1970 of the post's creation / 10,000
trending = rshares part + seconds since 1970 of the post's creation / 240,000

What follows from the formula:

• Votes count logarithmically, time linearly. Ten times the rshares add 1 to the score; in hot, 10,000 seconds of age (2.8 hours) also add 1, so a post two days newer outranks one with 100 times its votes. In trending, 1 point is 240,000 seconds (2.8 days), so votes matter more and a post stays near the top for about a week.
• A post leaves both lists when it pays out, 7 days after publication: Hivemind sets its scores to zero then. Comments never have a score.
• A vote is worth its rshares, so the chain's rules decide the input: stake, voting mana, and since hardfork 30 the 50,000-rshares dust threshold (Voting and Curation). Hivemind only orders.
• Hivemind scales old votes. For votes in blocks before 905,693 it multiplies the chain's rshares by one million, an inherited rule from Steem's early chain; for later votes it keeps the chain's value (Differences from Hive). The chain crossed that block on 2026-10-05, so until the posts voted before then pay out, around 2026-10-12, Trending is dominated by them: a vote before the boundary counts a million times a vote after it. This is an indexer artefact, not a rule, and it ends by itself.

The scores are not shown to users and no API returns them directly; bridge.get_ranked_posts returns the posts in score order.

The personal feed

The Feed page (/feed) is for a logged-in account. It asks Hivemind for condenser_api.get_discussions_by_feed with the account's name, falling back to bridge.get_account_posts with sort: "feed"; a visitor who is not logged in sees Trending instead (FeedPersonal.js:396-432).

Hivemind builds a feed from its hive_feed_cache: the root posts of every account the reader follows, and the posts those accounts reblogged, from the last month, newest first (get_account_posts.sql:211). Comments are not in it, and nothing is ranked; a follow is the only input.

Following

A follow is a custom_json operation with id follow, signed with the posting key, whose payload names the follower, the followed account and a what list (Operations Reference):

The chain stores the operation and nothing else: no follower count, no feed. Hivemind keeps hive_follows and the counts that bridge.get_profile and condenser_api.get_follow_count return. A follow appears in the feed once Hivemind has processed the block, a few seconds after it is included.

Communities

A community is a Hivemind construct (Communities): an account named portal- followed by five to seven digits, whose first digit is 1, 2 or 3 for the three community types, created by custom_json with id community (community.py:127, 176). A post belongs to it when its parent_permlink, the category, is the community's name.

The community page (/<portal-name>) has four tabs: created, hot, trending and votes. The first three are Hivemind's sorts for that community; the fourth asks bridge.get_ranked_posts for a votes sort that Hivemind does not have, so the fourth tab is always empty (Community.js:428). The page also loads one page of 20 posts and has no way to load more.

Moderation shows in the lists through Hivemind's stats on each post:

Muting does not touch the chain or the author's profile; the post stays readable everywhere else.

Paging

Every list is fetched 20 posts at a time, Hivemind's maximum for a bridge call (JSON-RPC Surface). The home and personal feeds load the next 20 as you scroll, passing the last post as start_author and start_permlink; the community page does not. The app keeps the last list for each tab and tag in memory, so switching back is instant and refreshes behind the scenes.

What never appears

The lists leave posts out at three levels. Only the first is the chain's.

Nothing hides a post from someone who reads the chain directly (Censorship Resilience and Moderation).

What the chain, the indexer and the app each decide

Inherited → changed

Sources

• App at commit ca1d157: Feed.js:167-168, 469-528 (sorts, sources, page size), Feed.js:296-304 (NSFW), FeedPersonal.js:396-432, Community.js:428, PaperCardBlog.js:70, ImageMeasurer.js; tab labels and the tour text, en.js:87, 142-144, 2961.
• Hivemind at commit 5765e21: hot_and_trends.sql:44-126; the rshares scaling, massive_sync.sql:373-377; the feed window, get_account_posts.sql:211; the result limit, api_limits.sql:6; community names, community.py:127.
• Live checks, 2026-10-08: bridge.get_ranked_posts with sort: "promoted" and sort: "votes" returned errors on api.pixagram.com; limit: 21 was rejected; the block-905,693 boundary was crossed at 2026-10-05 23:36 UTC (block_api.get_block_header).