Why a separate Mentions list?
The same person or project usually has different handles on different platforms. A friend might be @alex_writes on X, @alex.writes on Bluesky, and alex-writes on LinkedIn. If you type @alex_writes straight into the body of a multi-platform post, it lands wrong on most of those platforms.
Mentions solves this. You save a contact once, with one handle per platform you care about. When you tag that contact in a post, FeedMansion picks the right handle for each platform at publish time. Where you have no handle for a given platform, the contact's display name appears as plain text instead of a broken @nobody.
Setting up Mentions
Go to Manage → Mentions for this presence. You can add two kinds of contacts:
Link a presence. Choose this when the contact is one of your own presences. The handles fill in automatically from the social accounts you've connected to that presence, and they update on their own as you connect more. If you wire up a new platform later, the link picks it up without any extra work on the Mentions.
Add an external contact. Choose this for anyone else: collaborators, friends, projects you partner with. Type a display name, then fill in handles for the platforms where the contact has an account. Leave the rest blank.
You can edit a contact at any time. Deleting a contact doesn't delete drafts that mention them. The mention falls back to "(deleted contact)" so you notice and can remove or replace it.
Tagging in the editor
In a draft body, type @. A picker opens with your saved contacts, with linked presences listed first. Filter by typing a few characters of the display name or any handle (so @alex_w finds Alex even when you're thinking of the X handle and the display name doesn't start with that).
Use Arrow keys and Enter to insert. The contact appears as a chip in the editor; the actual handle for each platform is substituted in when the post is generated for that platform. You'll see the platform-specific result on the Review and post-detail pages.
What FeedMansion does at publish time
For every target platform on the post, FeedMansion looks up the contact's handle for that platform and inserts @handle into the body before character-limit truncation. Where the contact has no handle for the platform, the renderer inserts the display name as plain text instead. Where you copy-paste a body containing a chip, the canonical token is preserved so the link to the contact survives.
Some platforms support real structured tags (Bluesky, Instagram on photo posts, LinkedIn for personal profiles). Those land in follow-up updates per platform; the text version always works.
Limitations to know about
- Verifying a handle ahead of time is only possible on a handful of platforms (Bluesky, Mastodon). On Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, and most others, FeedMansion can't reliably check that a handle exists until the post itself is sent. Mentions is honest about that: contacts you add show "unverified" for those platforms by design. The settings page only shows verified or invalid icons; an unmarked handle on those platforms is normal, not a warning.
- Linked presences only cover presences you own. If you want to tag a presence you collaborate on but don't own, add it as an external contact instead and copy the handles in by hand. Linking presences you don't own is deliberately blocked because handles on those presences aren't yours to read on someone else's behalf.
- Editing the handle set on an external contact resets the validation state for that contact. The next background re-validation pass picks it back up; until then, all of that contact's handles show as unverified.
- AI rewriting and mentions work together. The system protects mention chips through the AI rewrite step, and the model is instructed to preserve them verbatim. In rare cases the AI may still mangle a chip; if you see an
@[mention:...]token leak through into a published post, please report it.