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Syg.ma is an open platform where everybody can publish. Its functioning is supported by the editorial team together with a community of authors and readers. Since 2014, researchers, artists, poets, small publishers, cultural institutions, and self-organizations have been publishing their materials on syg.ma on their own (here you can learn how to properly format a text for publication).

Our website is not limited to the main page with materials selected by the editorial team. Within it, there are many thematic collections, special projects, and author pages that any user can subscribe to, eventually creating their own personalized feed of texts. In this material, we want to tell you about the ways to navigate the platform.

1. Main Page

On the main page, by default, you can only see the materials that the editorial team finds especially interesting and important. This is indicated by the "Featured" button on the left-hand side of the screen. To see all publications that meet the minimum selection criteria, choose the "Recent" option. The "Popular" button will show you the most read material of the past month.

Syg.ma is a multilingual platform. In the top left corner, you can sort texts by the language in which they are written. Currently, these are English, Ukrainian, Uzbek, Russian, German, and Belarusian. We are working to add more languages in the future.

In the top right corner of the page, you can:

1. Enable radio.syg.ma
2. Create your material
3. View notifications about user interactions with your texts—comments, subscriptions, additions to favorites
4. Go to your personal page
5. Open the menu with the main collections, authors, tags, and popular names, as well as links to syg.ma accounts on social networks.

Special mention should be made of the "Search" button in the top left corner of the screen. Over the past 10 years, more than 30,000 materials have been posted on the platform, making syg.ma a fully-fledged archive of cultural, academic, and social life of the past decade. With this button, you can easily find materials published from the very beginning of the platform’s existence, as well as any collections and users.

By clicking the "Explore" button on the right side of the screen, you will be taken to a page listing the main thematic collections, popular tags, and important names. This is very convenient for getting an idea of the main topics of our platform’s content and starting your exploration.

2. Special projects

At the bottom of the main page, you’ll find special projects. These are collaborations between the platform’s editorial team and various partners, including the community, friendly media outlets, foundations, and institutions.

3. Collection

An important element of the site is the collections of texts that a user can subscribe to in order to independently follow their updates and see materials on a topic that do not appear on the main page. Every day, syg.ma editors review the texts published on the site and add them to these thematic collections.

In addition to thematic collections, the site has collections of publishers, magazines, institutions, and communities. Most of them are created by users independently and are updated autonomously from the syg.ma editorial team. Each collection can have several administrators and, thus, be used for group project work. For such collections, syg.ma offers special extensions—custom design, the ability to pin certain texts, and create hyperlinks in the project description.

By clicking the "Menu" button in the far right corner of the screen and selecting "Collections", you will go to a page with all editorial and user collections.

Every text published on syg.ma, whether it appears on the main page or in thematic collections, is displayed on the author’s personal page. You can also follow the author. To do this, click the "Menu" button and select "Authors". This will show you an alphabetical list of platform users who have published something on it.

On the main page of the site, above the title of the material, you will find the thematic collection it was added to, below the title is a link to the author’s page.

4. How to follow updates

You can create your own feed consisting of materials that interest you specifically. To do this, click the "My Feed" button on the main page. All new texts published by authors you have subscribed to will appear there.

To subscribe, you need to click the "Follow" button on the author or collection page.

5. How to find out about new publications without visiting the site

Just subscribe to our newsletter. To set it up, you also need to click on your profile picture, select "Settings" from the dropdown menu, and check the boxes for the newsletters you want to see in your inbox.

Syg.ma has only two types of newsletters. One of them you create yourself when you subscribe to authors and/or collections—every week, new texts from your subscriptions, as well as the most popular materials on the platform, will be sent to your email.

The other is compiled by syg.ma editors. In this newsletter, we talk about our special projects, share platform news, and compile selections of the most important texts. We promise not to overwhelm you with emails—the editorial newsletter will be sent no more than three times a month.