Messages — Shiijak User Manual

Start a conversation

Tap Messages → the new-message button, and pick someone.
Or open their profile and choose to message them.
Write and send. Photos ride along with the 🖼 button.

Inbox vs Requests

Messages from people you don't follow land in Requests, not your Inbox.
Accept a request to move it across; decline and they're not told.
Who may message you at all is set in Messages → the gear icon → Message settings — not the main Settings tab. Choose Everyone, People you follow, or No one.
A message can be up to 4,000 characters — far longer than a post.

The Messages inbox. — Fig. 1 · The inbox, with Inbox and Requests lanes.

React to a message

Press and hold any message.
Tap one of the quick reactions — ❤️ 💡 🤝 😂 😮 — or ＋ for any emoji at all.
The reaction appears as a chip under the message. Tap your own chip to take it back.
Later, use the ☺+ chip beside existing reactions to add another without the long press.

A DM thread showing reaction chips under messages, inline emoji, and the composer. — Fig. 2 · Reactions sit under the message they belong to. Emoji typed into a message sit inline, at text size.

Quiet by design

A reaction never sends a notification and never marks the chat unread.
On the web you get the same five reactions, but no "+" for arbitrary emoji.

Which build are you on?

Message reactions, stickers and conversation colours are switched off in the shipping app and on in demo builds. If you don't see them, that's why — nothing is broken.

Emoji and stickers

Two different things, and the difference matters.

Tap the ☺ button beside the message box. (In DMs this button belongs to the sticker tray — if stickers are off in your build, use your keyboard's own emoji key instead.)
The Emoji tab types a normal emoji into your message — between words, deletable with backspace.
The other tabs — Essentials, Newsroom Reactions, Deal Flow, After Hours — are Shiijak's own drawn stickers.
Tapping a sticker stages it; nothing sends until you press Send. Send it alone and it arrives large; send it with text and it sits inline, at text size.

The sticker tray open on the Emoji tab, with tabs for Essentials, Newsroom Reactions and Deal Flow. — Fig. 3 · The tray. Emoji type into your message; the sticker sets are sent as art.

Colour-code a conversation

Give a chat a colour so you always know which thread you're in. Only you ever see it.

In a conversation, tap the 🎨 palette icon at the top-right.
Pick a colour — Paper, Rose, Sage, Sky, Butter, Lilac, Slate, Crimson.
The thread takes on that wash, and the conversation gets a matching stripe in your inbox.

The Conversation color sheet: eight colour swatches with a privacy note. — Fig. 4 · "Only you see this — it's never shown to them." The other person cannot tell.

Private, and useful

The colour is never shown to the other person, and never announced.
It follows you across your own devices.
Its real job is wayfinding: you never reply in the wrong thread again.

Sending with no signal

Once you press Send, the message is yours to keep — it survives losing signal, quitting the app, even a reboot.

Send normally. Offline, the message waits in a queue and shows as queued.
When you're back online it sends itself, in the order you wrote them.
A message that truly failed can be tapped to retry, or long-pressed to copy or delete.

Calling someone — not from the phone

If you've gone looking for a call button in a conversation and can't find one, you haven't missed it.

Video calls are a browser feature

There is no calling in the phone app. Video calls — with screen sharing — live on shiijak.com, where you ring someone from inside a conversation. It's the one thing the browser does that your phone can't.