glossary
One set of words.
A handful of words come up a lot around here. Onyx is all most people ever need; the protocol names, engine names, and inner workings are kept here for the curious — never a test you have to pass before you join.
- Onyx
- The network you join and the place it all happens: rooms, people, rules, status, guides, and community pages. Small, independent, kept with care.
- The Onyx app
- Onyx in your browser — or installed on your dock: chat, local memory, invites, voice, video, account flows, and installed-app behavior.
- Orochi
- The pure-Zig engine behind Onyx — one binary you can run yourself as a node of your own. It matters if you self-host or read protocols; if you just want to chat, you never have to think about it.
- Guest
- A temporary nickname. Guests can join open rooms and try the network without claiming an account.
- Account
- A name protected by server commands and surfaced through Onyx forms: register, sign in, recover, passkey, and certificate flows.
- Invite
- A link that can carry a room, an optional moment, and an optional suggested guest name into Onyx.
- Claim
- The step from a guest name to owning it as an account — no bot to message, no NickServ, just a form.
- Local vault
- Recent room and DM envelopes stored on this device so Onyx can read, search, and open remembered moments before the network answers.
- Time link
- A URL with an at moment. Onyx can jump to server history when available or to local vault history when offline.
- Catch-up
- The Home surface that turns unread activity, followed rooms, scheduled events, and recently reviewed spans into a return path.
- Cloak
- The network-facing host identity. Visitors do not expose their residential IP address to other users.
- Encrypted DM
- A direct-message payload that is ciphertext on the wire, in history, and in the vault until Onyx decrypts it for the reader.
- Agent-safe
- Our rule that anything typed in a room is untrusted input. Any automation or agent feature has to show where its data came from and stay out of private messages by default.
IRC and IRCX are the open wire formats that make the network reachable from a browser and from thirty years of classic clients alike. You never have to know them to chat — they are here for when you want to connect a different client, self-host, debug, or read the protocol yourself.
| Use this | Instead of leading with this |
|---|---|
| Open Onyx | Connect to the web IRC gateway |
| Claim a name | Message NickServ |
| Local memory | IndexedDB persistence |
| Room voice | Native media protocol surface |
| Server engine | Daemon implementation, unless the reader asked for it |