Rooms and channels
A room is a community: a gaming group, a club, a team. It lives on one node and has members, roles and channels, grouped into categories. Your rooms are listed in the narrow bar on the far left, the room rail; rooms of other nodes appear there under their domain. You can group rooms into folders: right-click the empty rail and choose New folder…, or drop one room onto another. A click on a folder opens and closes it; a closed folder shows small icons of its rooms and adds up their unread messages.
A green speaker on a room’s icon means somebody is in one of its voice channels; while somebody shares a screen it turns into a monitor. Rest the pointer on a room (or press and hold it on a phone) to see its card: the members, the description, what is new and who is in which voice channel.
Kinds of channels
Section titled “Kinds of channels”| Channel | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Text | Conversations with messages, replies, reactions and threads |
| Voice | Talking, video and screen sharing; click it to join |
| Announcements | News from the moderators; everybody else reacts or replies in a thread |
| Forum | Posts with a title and tags, sorted by latest activity or newest posts |
| Files | A shared folder tree with uploads, folders and previews |
A small lock next to each channel shows its encryption. A closed lock means end-to-end encrypted, which is the default and always the case for voice channels. An open lock in a warning colour means the channel is not end-to-end encrypted, and the channel says so in a banner. Some rooms and channels are marked 18+ and are only open to adults.
Two more marks tell who may use a channel. A group with a slash marks a private channel: only some roles may see it (or, on a voice channel, join it). A no-entry sign means the channel is restricted for you: you can see it but not join it, or only read in it; its name is dimmed, and the channel explains the rest when you open it. Room owners can check what each role sees with View room as this role.
Joining a room
Section titled “Joining a room”Most rooms are joined with an invite link that a member shares with you. Open it, read the room’s rules if it has any, tick I accept the rules, and choose Join. Rules are formatted like messages: headings, lists, bold text and links; long rules scroll inside their box. An invite pasted under + → Join with an invite shows them the same way. Invite links can expire after an hour, a day, seven days or thirty days, or never, and can be limited to a number of uses.
Someone can also invite you directly by your address. Such invitations wait in the invite list on your home view until you accept them.
Discover
Section titled “Discover”Discover, the compass in the room rail, lists the public rooms and nodes your node knows about, across the whole network. Every card shows the domain of the node that hosts the room, and you can filter by name and size. Choose Join to become a member; for a room on another node, your home node vouches for you, and you keep using your own account.
Room owners make their room appear in Discover under Room settings → Overview → Listed in the directory.
Creating a room
Section titled “Creating a room”Choose + in the room rail to create a room, if your node allows you to. A new room starts with a text channel, a voice channel and a welcome channel. Add channels with Create channel, and see moderation for room owners for roles and permissions.
The order of the channel list is set under Room settings → Channels. Drag a channel or a category by its handle, or use the arrows next to it, to move it up or down; drop a channel on a category to move it there. The sidebar follows at once. The rules of the room are written under Room settings → Overview in Markdown, with a Preview under the field.
