If the Stele panel says “You must be signed in” while stele.so is clearly signed in on the same browser, the extension is almost certainly being blocked from reading stele.so. It is a browser setting, not a problem with your account, and nothing has been lost.
The giveaway is that the account menu on stele.so also says “Extension not installed” even though the panel opens on other sites.
Why it happens
Chrome and Brave let you control when an extension may read a site, under a setting called site access. When it is set to “On click”, the extension is only allowed to touch the page you are on at the moment you click its icon.
That is enough for the capture panel to open, which is why everything looks like it is working. It is not enough for Stele to check stele.so for your session in the background, so it cannot tell that you are signed in.
The fix
- Open chrome://extensions, or brave://extensions on Brave.
- Find Stele and click Details.
- Under Site access, choose “On specific sites” and add stele.so.
- Reopen the Stele panel. You should already be signed in.
Granting stele.so alone is enough, and it is the smallest change that fixes this: capture keeps working on other sites through the click you already make to open the panel. Choosing “On all sites” instead also works, and saves that click.
The quickest route is to open stele.so, right-click the Stele icon in the toolbar, choose “This can read and change site data”, and pick the stele.so option.
If that was not it
Two other things produce the same screen. Check whether stele.so is signed in under a different browser profile from the one holding the extension, since sessions and extensions do not cross profiles.
Also reload any stele.so tab you had open before installing or updating the extension. A tab opened beforehand never receives the extension, so it reports it as missing until you refresh.
If none of that helps, send us a message from Settings → Send feedback and we will pick it up from there.