How it works
The path a public post takes from a platform to the top of your inbox, and what happens to it on the way.
Five steps, in order. Everything else in these docs is a detail of one of them.
1. Collection
FishOut polls ten platforms for your keywords: Reddit, Hacker News, Bluesky, GitHub and Google News every hour on every plan, and on paid plans YouTube and Medium every 6 hours and LinkedIn, TikTok and X once a day. Keywords you mark Fast (5 on Plus, 50 on Pro, 150 on Business) are checked every 15 minutes on Reddit, Hacker News and Bluesky.
On Reddit, Hacker News, Bluesky and X it collects replies as well as posts; elsewhere it collects the posts, videos and articles themselves (what each platform gives). A reply saying "same here, we switched last month" is meaningless on its own, so when the post it answers is in your project too, FishOut links the two.
Only public content is collected — nothing from a private account, a closed group, or anywhere that needs a login to read.
2. Filtering
A post becomes a mention when it matches one of your keywords and survives that keyword's advanced filters — exclude words, must-also-mention, sources, posts or replies. Posts from your own accounts, and from authors and sources you have muted, are dropped here too.
All of this is exact matching, done before any AI. A post dropped here costs nothing.
3. Triage
Every mention that survives is read by the AI once, together with your project's Brief and the keyword's Means line. It produces:
- a relevance from 0 to 100, with Why chips saying what the AI saw;
- labels — what the post is doing, from asking for a recommendation to complaining;
- a sentiment and a language;
- on Reddit, Hacker News and YouTube, a Reply call: Reply now, Reply, carefully, Watch or Skip.
Posts below the relevance threshold go to the Filtered view with a reason instead of the inbox, and never count toward your plan. Your team's corrections are sent along as examples, so triage learns from what you teach it. This step has its own page: Relevance and labels.
4. Agents
Once a mention is triaged, your agents run. An agent is a rule — Reply call is Reply now and subject is A topic → draft a reply, assign to Mark, post to #inbound. Agents label, assign, notify and draft; they never post.
5. The inbox, and everywhere else
What is left arrives in your inbox, sorted best first, with built-in views like Reply now, Leads and Support. From there it is a queue: assign, snooze, archive, reply. Each morning the Daily brief picks the posts worth engaging with and flags any spikes.
The same data leaves FishOut three other ways at the same time:
- to your team, through alerts — Slack, Teams, Discord, Telegram, email and eight more, each with its own relevance floor;
- to your code, through the REST API and webhooks;
- to your assistant, through the MCP server.
What never happens
FishOut does not post. Not to the thread, not as you, not from a pooled account. It writes the draft and stops. See Replies.