Push Notifications

Push notifications are alerts that reach your phone even when Nuts isn’t open — a banner on your lock screen, a sound, a badge on the app icon. This is an app-only feature right now; see On the web below for how you’re notified if you’re using nuts.social in a browser instead.

Turning on push notifications

There’s no in-app switch to turn push on for the first time — Nuts asks your device for permission automatically.

1. The first time you open the app, or shortly after you sign in, your phone shows a system prompt asking whether Nuts can send you notifications.

2. Tap Allow. The exact wording of the prompt depends on your device’s operating system, but the choice is the same everywhere: allow it now, or push notifications stay off.

3. If you dismissed the prompt or tapped Don’t Allow and want to turn push back on later, open your device’s system Settings app, find Nuts under Notifications (or Apps), and enable notifications there. Nuts can’t re-ask for you once you’ve said no.

Once you grant permission, your device is registered for push automatically — there’s nothing else to set up. If you sign into a different account on the same device, push notifications follow that account instead.

What sends you a push

Most push notifications are covered by the categories you control on Notification Settings: likes, comments, replies, mentions, direct messages and group chats, and community updates. A small number of notifications — like a new follower, or someone tagging you in a Shell — always come through and don’t have an on/off switch.

Right now, each notification arrives on its own. If someone sends you several chat messages back to back, you’ll get a separate notification for each message rather than a single notification that groups them together.

Tapping a push notification takes you straight to what it’s about — the chat, the post, or the profile.

On the web

There’s no push notification system on the web version of Nuts. If your browser is closed, or nuts.social isn’t open in a tab, nothing reaches you — unlike the app, web notifications don’t work in the background when you’re not there.

What the web version offers instead is a browser-level alert: on the Notifications tab, you’ll see a one-time prompt to enable browser notifications. If you allow it, your browser can show you a notification while Nuts is open in a background tab — but it stops as soon as you close the tab or the browser. For anything you might have missed, check the Notifications tab itself, which always has the full history regardless of push or browser alerts.