Message Best

A room is a seven-character code. Whoever starts it gets the code and hands it over however they like — the invite link, an email, or read out loud. The first one hundred people who present the code are seated; the hundred-and-first is told the house is full. A seat belongs to the device that claimed it, so a reload, a back button or a re-tapped invite puts you back in your chair instead of burning a fresh one.

Every browser keeps its own copy of the conversation and the server only sequences: it holds the event book, knows who holds which seat, and hands each member the events they have not seen. Messages are text end to end — what you type is what is stored, and the page renders it as text, never as markup. The house runs many rooms side by side — each code is its own book, its own seats, its own shelf — and one device can be seated in several at once: the invite panel lists your other chairs, one tap hops between them without giving any of them up.

Everything travels over HTTPS, so nothing on the network between you and the server can read it. In an ordinary room, the plain truth: messages sit in the room's event book as ordinary text for the room's short life — whoever runs the server could read the book. Treat such a room like a table at a café: private from the street, not from the house.

A sealed room — the 🔒 toggle when you start one — closes that gap for what you type and for what you share. The key is minted on your device and rides the invite link's #fragment, the one part of a URL a browser never sends; every message is AES-GCM encrypted before it leaves and after it arrives, and a file travels the same way — each 4MB piece becomes its own sealed frame, the name and kind ride a sealed label, and the server sequences and stores ciphertext it cannot read or name. The honest edges: whoever holds the invite link holds the key, and the room's name and the seats' names stay readable. SAVE CHAT in a sealed room prints from your own screen, since the server's copy of the book would read as noise.

SAVE CHAT in the room bar prints the whole book — every line, file, mark and coming-and-going the room still holds — into a plain text file for your own records. Anyone seated can save one; it reads like a stage play and hosts nothing. Signed in to an account, the same press shelves a copy on your profile as well — a sealed room's copy is shelved as plain text, and the card says so.

An account is optional and rooms never ask for one — a code seats anybody, exactly as before. What an account adds: a username that stays yours (3–20 letters, digits, dots, dashes or underscores), a password you can change from the account panel (changing it signs every other device out), an activity log the profile keeps — sign-ins, rooms entered, chats shelved — and a shelf of up to a dozen saved transcripts you can pull down or discard from any signed-in device. The password is stored only as a modern hash; sign-ins ride short-lived tokens that expire after thirty days untouched, held on at most eight devices. SIGN OUT EVERYWHERE walks every token out at once, and DELETE ACCOUNT — password confirmed — takes the whole record with it, shelf and log included.

MY ACCOUNT opens the control panel. A profile picture is a small square — your browser shrinks it to 96 pixels before it travels, and REMOVE takes it off the record. An email address is optional and does exactly one job: it is the way back in when the password is lost. Nothing is on the record until the mailbox answers — a six-digit code goes to the new address, and you type it into the panel or click the link in the mail itself. Codes live fifteen minutes and burn after five wrong tries; changing the address works the same way, and taking it off the record costs the password. Forgot the password? Under SIGN IN, type the username and press FORGOT — if the account carries an email, a reset code lands there; the code plus a new password signs you in on the spot and walks every other device out. An account with no email on record has no reset — the register cannot mail what it never knew.

Anything up to 1GB: photographs, screen recordings, movies, archives, documents. A big file travels in 4MB pieces so a wobbly connection retries the piece, not the whole. Images, video and audio show themselves in the room; every other kind arrives as a card with a download button, and is always served as a plain download — a chat room is not a place to host a page. The microphone button records a voice note of up to five minutes and sends it down the same conveyor, so it plays in place like any other audio. In a sealed room every file is encrypted on your device before the first piece leaves; small media unseals itself in place, and a big movie waits for a tap before its ciphertext is pulled down.

Yes. Every name in the strip under the room bar is a door: tap a seat and the window becomes a direct with that person — the same feed, the same composer, replies and files and the burn clock all working exactly as they do in the room. The arrow beside the name takes you back to the room, and a tap on the same pill does too. A direct that arrives while you are elsewhere puts a small count on that person's pill and says so once, so it is never something you only find later.

Be clear about what private means here: a direct is held by this wire and handed to the two seats it belongs to and to nobody else — not the host, not the rest of the room. It is not a separate end-to-end secret from the server itself. In a sealed room a direct is sealed exactly as far as the room is, no further. The line keeps its place in the room's book so every other line still answers to its own number, but everyone else is handed a blank where it stood. Your saved transcript prints the directs you were part of, marked as such, and none of the others.

Tap any message to answer it in a quote, to press one of six marks on it — tap the mark again to take it back — to edit it if it is yours (the words are replaced in the book itself and the line says “edited”, to every seat and in the saved transcript) — or to unsend it if it is yours: the words are blanked in the book itself, a shared file's bytes go with them, and every seat (including one that joins later) sees a tombstone where it stood. The tally of marks travels the wire like everything else, so every seat sees the same counts. The bell in the room bar, when you turn it on, plays a soft note when the room speaks while you are in another tab — and, if you allow it, posts a browser notification you can tap to come back. The host can 📌 pin any line: it hangs in a strip over the room for every seat, a tap on the strip jumps to it, and the host's ✕ (or pinning another line) takes it down. Under your newest message a quiet ✓ Seen line says who has actually had it on screen — a seat only counts as having seen the room while its tab is front and visible, so a phone in a pocket claims nothing.

Type @ in the composer and the seats appear; a mention is lit for everyone and chimes for the one named even when their bell is off, so a question aimed at somebody actually lands. The magnifier in the room bar opens find — it searches the conversation as this device holds it, newest match first, and jumps between hits. A shared photograph opens full-size in a lightbox on tap; the room waits underneath it.

The 📊 button on the composer asks the room a question with up to four choices, answered in place on a card every seat sees. One vote per seat: a second tap moves it, the same tap takes it back, and the bars follow the count live. The asker — or the host — closes the poll, and the tally freezes where it stood. In a sealed room the question and the choices are encrypted like any line; the wire counts votes it cannot read. A poll and its count print in SAVE CHAT like everything else.

The ⏳ button arms a clock on your next line — taps walk it from one minute to five and off again. A burned line leaves for every seat when its clock runs out: the wire blanks it in the book itself, the way unsend does, so a late joiner replays a tombstone that says “burned” where the words stood. The clock arms one line at a time and shows on the line itself while it runs. A burned file takes its bytes with it.

PUSH, under SETTINGS, is for the tab you closed: when a word lands while this device is away, the wire sends one empty nudge per absence — the push channel never carries the words, not even encrypted. Woken, this device asks the wire which of my rooms hold unseen words and shows a card with a name and a room code; one tap seats you again. Sealed rooms and ordinary rooms read exactly the same from the outside. The choice is per device, follows you into every room you sit in, and turns off in the same place.

WEBCAM seats up to four people in one call — browser to browser, DTLS-SRTP encrypted, a full mesh in which this server never sees a frame; the wire only ferries the handshakes. Anyone on the call can add a third and a fourth, and the newcomers knit themselves to everyone already on without ringing twice. SCREEN swaps your camera's lane for your screen — a tab, a window or the whole desk — and hands it back when you stop. CAM and MIC flip mid-call; off means a black frame or silence, never a dropped seat.

Whoever started the room holds three powers and no more: LOCK stops anyone new from being seated while everyone present talks on, the small ✕ on a member chip frees that seat — tapped twice, so a stray thumb cannot empty a chair — and the room can be named from the invite panel, a name every seat sees in the room bar and on their lobby chip. The host may also remove anyone's message, the way the sender may unsend their own. A removed device is not seated again by the same invite. And the key never walks out with its holder: if the host leaves while others remain, it passes to the longest-seated member and the room is told.

It writes a link. Put your Venmo username, your PayPal.me name or your Cash App $cashtag into TOOLS → CASH once and the panel builds an ordinary link to that service with the amount, the direction and the note already in it — to paste into the room, or into a text. Whoever taps it lands in their own app with the form filled in.

Which way decides what the link says. THEY PAY ME points all three services at you. I PAY THEM uses the one verb a Venmo profile link takes: they tap it and Venmo composes a request to you, you approve, they are paid. PayPal.me and Cash App links can only ever point money at a person, so for those the panel takes their handle instead and hands you a link you open yourself — and says so on the row.

The paste carries the amount. A raw venmo.com link previews as Venmo’s own front door — their logo, their words, and no mention of who is asking, what for, or how much, which is the whole point. So a link you SEND goes through message.best, which draws the preview itself: PAY JANE · $20.50 · FOR DINNER, on a plate, under the message. Tapping it forwards straight to the real service on the next breath. A link you open yourself is never pasted anywhere, so it stays the plain one.

MESSAGE BEST never sees a payment. Nothing here moves money, holds a balance, or talks to any of the three services. The handles are three short names, kept on your device and — if you have an account — on it, so the panel opens already filled. The money, if any, happens over there.

A room lives thirty days past its last word, then it is swept and its files go with it. The host can move the KEEP dial under TOOLS → SETTINGS from 30 DAYS to 90 DAYS — and move it back. Every seat can read the dial; only the host can turn it. The last person to leave still closes the room on the spot. Nothing here has an account, a profile, or a history that outlives the room unless you ask for one.