Rooms: a place you host

Open a room for an event, a season, a club or a topic — you decide who gets in, who speaks, and whether the guest list shows — and it can hold hundreds of people without turning your notifications into a firehose.

A message thread is for people you've chosen; a group thread is for a handful of them. A room is different: somebody hosts it. That's the whole idea. You set one up, you own it, and you can walk out of it any time.

Opening one

Anybody can open a room. You give it a name and pick a starting style, and the room arrives already set up:

Announcements — you and the people you name do the talking; everyone else listens, and the guest list stays private.
Public square — anyone can join and everyone can speak. The town hall.
Discussion — everyone who's in it can see each other and speak, from the moment they arrive. The everyday room.
Presentation — invited or registered guests listen to your speakers, and can chat one-to-one afterwards. The talk, then the hallway.
Team room — everyone's in, everyone speaks.

A style is a starting point, not a cage. Every single thing it set up, you can change — right away, or six months later. There is no "room type" that fights you.

Who speaks, and who shows

Two separate things decide what a room feels like for you, and keeping them separate is what makes rooms work.

What you may do — you're an attendee (reading), a presenter (speaking), or an owner (running the place). Owners can hand out any of those, including owner: a room can have several owners, and it always keeps at least one — the last owner can't leave until they've handed the keys to someone.

Whether you show — separately from all of that, your name is either on the guest list or not. In an open room that's your choice: you can be here, just listening, without your name on the roster. Some rooms — an announcements room, where a private guest list is the entire point — keep every listener off the roster, and that one isn't yours to override.

The rule that ties them together: to speak, you have to show. You can't post from behind the curtain, because your first message would give you away anyway. So going quiet is a two-step move when you've been speaking: step down to listener first, then go off the roster. Your earlier posts stay where they are — stepping back doesn't erase what you already said.

Moderators

A moderator is a job, not a rank. Owners have it automatically and can give it to anyone — a listener can be a moderator, and it doesn't move them up the ladder. Moderators can remove anybody's post, and the badge carries the right to speak with it, so a moderator who's a listener can still post.

The one exception is the rule above: a moderator who has gone off the guest list still can't post, and in a room that keeps its listeners private, a moderator moderates without speaking. Being handed a job should never quietly put your name on a list you chose to stay off.

Moderating isn't owning. Settings, roles and who gets in stay with the owner.

Getting in

You're invited or added. An owner or moderator seats you directly.
You join. Where a room's door is open, you walk in.
You're enrolled by something you did. Registered for the event, hold the subscription, belong to the group — the room admits you because of the fact, and lets you go when the fact does. Buy a ticket and you're in; refund it and you're out, with nothing else about you touched.

However you arrive, you arrive on your own terms. If your standing preference is to stay off guest lists, being added doesn't spend that preference — somebody can give you a seat, never your visibility.

Being told about it — your dial, nobody else's

Being in a room and hearing about it are two different things. Every room has a dial that is yours alone — no owner can set it for you:

Everything — tell me about every post.
Digest — tell me about every post, but gathered up and delivered periodically instead of one at a time.
Mentions — only when someone @-names me.
Nothing — silence, mentions included.

Turning a room down takes none of your access away — you can still read every word of it. And a big room starts you off quiet by default whether you joined or were enrolled, because landing in a 1,500-person room should never mean 400 notifications before lunch.

Being named is the escape hatch. An @-mention reaches you straight away and is never held back into a digest — that's what makes a quiet room safe to keep quiet.

Inside the room

Reactions — tap an emoji on any message. You can react even if you're a listener who can't post; what a reaction needs is your name on the guest list, since the chips say who reacted.
Removing a post — you can always remove your own. Moderators can remove anyone's, and a small marker holds the place so the conversation keeps its shape.
If your post is removed, you're told — and told which authority did it ("a moderator of that room"), never which person, and never who reported it. The same protection runs the other way: if you report something, you hear the outcome and nothing else.
"12 here now" — rooms show how many people are watching, and never who. It's a number, deliberately: a room shouldn't be a place where people can watch each other arrive. When the count can't be trusted it simply isn't shown, rather than showing you a stale one.
Blocking works here too — someone you've blocked disappears from your view of the room. What it doesn't do is edit the room for everyone else, or hide your posts from them. Room content is room content, and we'd rather say so than promise something we can't enforce. If something doesn't belong in the room, the tools are report, a moderator, going off the roster, or the door.

Talking to someone you met there

Ordinary messaging rules still apply: DMs open between Connections. A room can open one extra door — but only when two things agree: the room allows messages between people in it, and you've said you're happy to receive them. Either one saying no means no, and announcement-style rooms never open that door at all.

When a room ends

Rooms wind down in stages rather than vanishing:

Locked — read-only. The history is all still there, the guest list is unchanged, and nobody was removed. An owner locks a room to calm it down or close a season — and moderation still works under a lock, which is exactly when a room needs it.
Archived — it leaves everyone's room list. Still there, still readable by its members.
Deleted — eventually, and permanently.

An owner can re-open a locked or archived room, and it comes straight back to life. Deleted is the one that's final.

When a door won't open

If a room won't let you in, it looks exactly like a room that doesn't exist. That's on purpose, and it's the same everywhere in rooms: a closed door doesn't explain itself. It means nobody can go fishing — trying ids to discover which rooms exist, or which ones they've been shut out of.

Good habits

Pick the style that matches the occasion, then adjust. It's much faster than setting nine things by hand, and nothing about it locks you in.
Turn a busy room down instead of leaving it. Muting keeps every word available to you when you want it; leaving doesn't.
Name a second owner early. A room with one owner is a room waiting on one person.
If you want to listen without your name showing, say so before you speak — once you're posting, stepping back is a two-step move.

Did you know? A room can admit people because of something they already did — everyone who registered for your event can be in the room the moment they register, and gone again if they refund, without you keeping a list or touching a single name.