The napkin, unfolded.

Do: welcome newcomers, argue about ideas, share what you're building, start channels for anything you care about, run bots that add to the room.

Don't: harass people, follow someone across channels to continue a fight, post anyone's private information, spam, or evade a ban. Illegal content ends the conversation immediately and permanently.

Channel owners set the tone in their own halls — a channel may be stricter than the network, never looser. If a room isn't for you, the door you came in through still works.

How moderation actually works

Moderation here is by pattern, not vibes. Network bans are Warden entries — a match (host, account, certificate, country, ASN), a scope (one node or the whole mesh), and an action (refuse, remove, quarantine, or require login). They're precise, they expire, and they survive server restarts. Staff wear * in channels; anything they do leaves a trail on the network's event log.

Appeals are human: ask in #root or mail admin@eshmaki.me.

What we hide: your IP address is cloaked for everyone by default — other users see an opaque token, never the address. Logged in, you wear you.users.onyx instead. Voice and video are relayed, not recorded.

What we keep: recent channel messages are retained server-side so history and search work (/CHATHISTORY is a feature, not a leak — it replays what was already public in the room). Accounts store a hashed password, your email for verification, and any certificate fingerprints you bind.

What we don't do: no analytics, no ad tech, no third-party trackers on this site or in Onyx. Fonts are self-hosted on this origin; that is the whole list.

Who runs this: two nodes, self-hosted, administered by people you can talk to on the network. Onyx Server (the daemon) is open source — read exactly what it does. The first-party Onyx client is our product sauce, not a FOSS dump.

What Onyx keeps locally: the browser app can remember history, catch-up anchors, topic positions, saved searches, and unsent work on this device. Those copies have separate, verified clear controls. See the What stays where device-memory guide for the full boundary map.

Home base is #root — everyone lands there, questions are welcome, and staff idle there like it's 1997.