Channels
Terminal carries the community with it. Channels is a messenger inside the application, organised the way you would expect: folders, channels inside them, and people you invite.
What you have on day one
Without doing anything:
| Channel | Who is in it |
|---|---|
| Community | Every licence holder |
| Announcements | Everyone — read only; the platform posts, nobody replies |
| Your clan's channel | The members of your clan, if you are in one |
Community sits at the top of the list, always. It is the one room every holder shares, so it is where to look when you do not yet know where to look — and the only channel whose position does not depend on which clan you are in or what somebody named their folder.
Your clan gets its own channel, automatically
If the wallet that authorised your Terminal belongs to a clan, that clan has a channel and you are in it. Nobody creates it and nobody adds you.
Membership is derived, never copied. The people who can read a clan channel are the clan's members, asked of the clan itself at the moment of the question. There is no separate participant list to fall out of step — and the one that falls out of step is always the one that was supposed to remove somebody.
Two consequences worth knowing:
- Leave the clan and the channel goes with it, the same minute.
- The channel's name follows the clan's. Rename the clan and the channel is not left calling itself something the clan no longer is.
Folders and channels
Your clan's leader can arrange the clan's space: create folders, create channels inside them, rename and reorder them, and delete them. The community's folders are the platform's.
A new channel is open by default — everybody in its scope, meaning the clan's members or, for a community channel, everybody. Open is the default deliberately: a channel nobody was invited to is a channel nobody can find, and somebody making a channel in their clan almost always means their clan.
Make it invite-only instead and it is visible to the people invited to it, and to nobody else. The leader invites and uninvites; the member list is on the channel.
Writing a message
Reply to a message and your answer carries a quote of it, so a conversation with three threads in it stays readable. The quote is a pointer, not a copy: if the original is taken back, the quote says so rather than keeping words its author withdrew.
Mention somebody by putting their wallet address after an @. It is picked out in the message, and it is what decides who is told about it.
Emoji come in two kinds, and they are different things. The face in the message box adds an emoji to what you are writing. The face on a message adds a reaction to what somebody else wrote. Press your own reaction again to take it back.
Take back your own message from its menu. The words go for good — not hidden behind a flag, and not left in anybody's quote of them. What stays is a line saying a message was taken back, because removing the row entirely would renumber the conversation and leave replies pointing at nothing. Only the author can do this. Not the clan leader: moderation reaches content in community areas, never the record of who said what to whom.
Files, pictures and links
Attach an image, an MP4 or WebM video, or a PDF — up to 20 MB. Images and video are shown in the conversation; anything else appears as a download. A file is a message on its own, so you do not have to type anything beside it.
What a file is gets decided by its first bytes, not by its name or by what your computer called it. That is why the list above is a list and not a suggestion: these files are shown on other people's screens, and something drawn as a picture has to actually be one. SVG is deliberately not accepted — it is a document that can carry script.
Taking a message back takes its files with it.
Links get a card with the title, description and picture the site publishes — and the platform reads that page, once, on your behalf. Your machine never contacts the site, and neither does anybody else's: the picture is fetched by the platform and served from MPRO Lab.
This is not how most chat applications do it, and the difference is worth knowing. Elsewhere, every person who scrolls past a link makes their own browser fetch that page — which tells the site who is reading it and when. From an application that holds your keys, over your own connection, that is a lot to give away for a headline.
Being told about a message
A count appears beside a channel with something new, and on the application's icon. You are told about a message when Terminal is not the window in front of you — never for something already on your screen, and never twice for the same backlog.
Mute a channel with the bell beside its name. A muted channel makes no sound and shows no count, because a number you cannot clear is a demand rather than information. Muting is local to this Terminal and travels with nothing: it is your preference at this machine, not a fact about your membership.
Unmuting is quiet until the next message. You are not handed everything you deliberately ignored.
The count on the icon works on macOS and most Linux desktops. On Windows it does not — that platform wants a different mechanism, and it is not built yet.
Who is on a channel
The column beside the conversation shows the people in it, split into who is around and who is not. Around means seen in the communicator in the last few minutes: it answers can I expect a reply now, not whether somebody's computer is switched on.
A community channel has no such list. Everyone with a licence can read it, and thousands of addresses is not a list worth showing.
Bots have channels too
A bot gets a channel when it first has something to say — its own, visible to you alone, where it posts what it did and where you can talk to it.
A bot's messages are always marked as a bot's. An agent never borrows a person's identity to speak. A log of what a machine did cannot afford to be ambiguous about who acted, and that is worth more than the small convenience of pretending otherwise.
Bot channels are not created in advance. You will not find a row of empty rooms for bots that have never run.
What to expect, and what not to
Said plainly rather than left to be discovered:
- Messages are stored on the platform, and the platform can read them. Retention is the platform's.
- There is no end-to-end encryption against us. An earlier design had peer-to-peer rooms with their own keys; it solved a problem — no central chat server — that this platform decided it does not have.
- Posting is rate-limited. A door that accepts a body is a door somebody eventually points a loop at.
If you need a genuinely private conversation, have it somewhere built for that.
The assistant is not a channel. The right-hand pane is a conversation with a model about your own data; it posts nowhere and nobody else sees it. See the terminal and the assistant.