# Syndie - Getting started

Welcome to Syndie! The first step to make use of Syndie is to open up the Share panel and configure what archives you want to share messages with.

If you don't have any archives defined (which you won't, at first), Syndie will offer a few default archives, configured so that you can access them through I2P, Tor, or directly.

Make any changes to the defaults that you wish, unchecking the rows you don't want at all, and hit "Save archives as your own" when complete. Alternately, if you want to define your own archives, just hit cancel and create them manually by hitting the Add archive button.

Once your archives have been defined, you want to schedule the time when Syndie will actually share messages with them - the Sync (just once) tells Syndie to share messages with the selected archive immediately, but just once, while Sync (recurring) tells Syndie to share messages with the selected archive immediately and repeat the sharing process periodically (to get and send new messages).

Once you have shared messages with other archives, Syndie will list a number of items under each archive showing what was sent and what was received. To view the newly received messages, select the View fetched messages button, which will bring you to a tree of all fetched messages organized by the forum they are posted in. Alternately, you can hit the Read button, then check the unread messages checkbox and hit the view all button, and select View combined to reach similar ends.

There is a lot to Syndie, so please explore! If you have any trouble, try posting up a message (with the Write button) and sharing that with one of the standard archives and help will be on the way. If there is a problem doing that, the developers can be reached on irc.freenode.net #i2p or on I2P's IRC network in #i2p.

Good luck!