Shout-outs & messages

Two different things. One is public and one nobody can read but you.

Shout-outs

Type @ in a comment or a reply and a short list of the writers already in that thread drops down. Pick one and their tag lands in what you're writing — and because you picked a real writer instead of just typing letters, the post that goes up carries an actual reference to them.

They find out. Not by email, because there isn't one; by a speech-bubble glyph in the top bar with a dot on it when somebody's said their name.

Shout-outs is that screen. Your name coming up, newest first.

• Plain replies to your own posts don't land here. Those are already sitting under the thing you put up. Only deliberate mentions do.
• The dot clears when you open the screen. The "last looked" stamp lives on your device, not on our side.
• Nothing about this involves a notification service, a push provider, or a third-party anything. There's nowhere to send a push to and nobody to send it.

Messages

Word is private messages. End to end, and the "end to end" is the load-bearing part.

What our box actually holds for a message is a sealed envelope signed by a throwaway one-shot name, addressed to the recipient and nothing else, with a timestamp deliberately smeared by up to two days. So the honest description of what the server knows is: somebody sent something to this tag, at some point in the last 48 hours. Not who. Not when. Not what.

• We cannot read your messages. Not a policy — the contents are encrypted between the two devices and we're never handed a key.
• We cannot tell who's talking to whom. The sender's own tag isn't on the outside of the envelope.
• Messages aren't copied into the searchable index at all. They sit on the box and your app fetches its own.

What encryption doesn't fix

Whoever you're messaging can screenshot it, and a message is only as private as the least careful device in the conversation. Encryption protects the wire, not the person on the other end of it.

Messages always come from your own tag

If you're posting as a crew, private word still goes out under your tag, on purpose. A shared inbox for a shared name means every crew member reads everyone's private conversations, which is a worse idea here than almost anywhere else.

So the top-bar switcher applies to what you put up publicly, never to word.

Where to go next

• Crews — posting under a shared tag.
• Boards, beef & happenings — where the shout-outs come from.
• For the nerds — the actual envelope construction, named.