Turn on sources

The Setup page’s Sources step (“Choose your sources”) is a grid of cards, one per source Maisnie knows how to connect to. Each card has a checkbox, a one-line summary of what it does, a short list of plain facts (roughly how often it checks for new things, and which folder its notes go in), and, while the source is off, a plain sentence describing exactly what leaving it off costs you. Nothing here asks for a password or a private link yet; that’s the next step, connect your accounts. This step is only about which sources you want at all, and it has one button, Save and continue.

The first row holds the three that need no sign-in: Calendar from a private link, News feeds and Morning briefing. Most people only need these. The rest (Google Calendar, Microsoft calendar, Mail, Slack, Discord and Matrix) sit under a More sources (optional) fold; open it to see them. The fold opens by itself when any source inside it is already on, so nothing is hidden from you when you come back. Save and continue stays at the bottom of the screen as you scroll, so you can press it as soon as you have ticked what you want.

This preview build ships these sources. The two calendar cards that need a sign-in (Google Calendar and Microsoft calendar) are the advanced way; the private link is simpler:

Discord is the one chat source that reads a server rather than you. Discord does not allow software to sign in as a person, so Maisnie reads through a small bot you make yourself and invite to your own server. The card says so on the tile: it reads only the servers you add it to, never your direct messages. Because a bot cannot tell which person is you, your own messages are filed under your Discord name, not as “You”. The steps to make the bot are on its card, on the next step (connect your accounts): create an application, turn on the Message Content Intent, copy the bot token, and open the invite link, which asks only to view channels and read message history.

Checking a box and saving always records which sources are enabled, whether or not your vault is set up yet. If your vault step has already been applied, saving also creates an empty folder in your vault for each source you just turned on (calendar, mail, feeds) and shows a notice saying so (“Maisnie added a folder in your vault for each one”), so the folder is there and empty before the connector has ever written into it. Turning a source back off never removes its folder; nothing about this step touches anything else. If your vault’s contract is older than what this version of Maisnie expects, the notice says so instead and sends you to the Vault step to review that upgrade first, rather than creating folders underneath an upgrade nobody has looked at yet.

A card that’s currently off shows a plain sentence describing what that costs you: this sentence is attached to the card’s current state, not to the act of saving, so you’ll see it both before and after you save while the source stays off, and it disappears once you turn that source on.

What turning a source off does

Nothing about a toggle is destructive. Turning a source off:

• Stops it from running again: the scheduler re-reads this setting on every tick, so a source you just turned off stops being started within moments, not after a restart, but a run already under way when you flip it keeps going and finishes normally, never cut off mid-sync.
• Leaves every note it already wrote exactly where it is.
• The notes a source already produced keep showing up in search and in the vault itself: they’re just files, and Maisnie doesn’t hide anything based on today’s toggle.
• Home’s own Sources list keeps a line for every source, on or off: an off source reads Off, in the same plain words every other status there uses (see daily use).

The sentence next to each off card states this plainly for that specific source, for example, Calendar’s says the calendar view stops refreshing while your existing meeting notes remain; Mail’s says mail stops updating while your existing threads and the people in them remain. Re-enabling a source later picks back up rather than starting over: each connector keeps its own cursor (mail’s last-seen message, the calendar feed’s own change marker) regardless of the toggle, so turning it back on continues from there, not from the beginning.

What turning a source on actually does

Saving this step (plus the folder it provisions, above) is not the same as a source actually reaching your vault: it’s the account you connect on the next step that lets a source do anything with that folder (a secret or setting this page never asks for). An enabled source still runs on its own schedule even with nothing saved there yet, but the scheduler notices it has nothing to work with and skips it rather than failing: Home’s Sources list reads Needs its details, in Settings for Calendar or Mail until you’ve saved what connect your accounts asks for, and that gap is noted at most once per its normal sync interval, never as a fresh error on every few-second scheduler tick. Feeds is the one exception: an empty feed list isn’t treated as missing anything, so it runs and simply finds nothing until you add an address. Enabling a source here is a real step worth taking, but the accounts step is what actually lets it write notes into that folder; see connect your accounts for how often that is, and how to run one immediately instead of waiting.

Next

Continue to connect your accounts.