Rooms

A room is where a conversation happens. Some rooms hold you and one companion; others hold several people, several companions, or two people and no companion at all. This page covers the rooms you make inside weside. A group on Telegram, Slack or Teams becomes a room too — that one has its own rules and its own page, bound rooms. For what a room is not, read what weside is not; for the four surfaces every room carries, read spaces and surfaces.

What it is

A room is a place with members. It has a name you can change, a picture, a timeline of everything said in it, and the four surfaces every room has: Chat, Timeline, Shelf and Stage.

There are two shapes:

A room with one companion. You and it. This is the room you get when you open a companion from the list, and it is the only kind that can host a voice call.
A group room. Several people, up to four companions, in any combination — including none at all.

The relationship stays 1:1 inside either shape. Your companion is yours; it carries its Soul, Mind, Body and Presence into every room it is in, and what it knows about you does not become the room’s property. A room is where more than one such relationship meets. How that separation is enforced is privacy and ownership.

Companions in a room read each other. When your companion answers, it has seen what the other companions in the room just said, so several of them in one place is a conversation rather than several monologues.

The room’s info screen says who is here and what you can change about the room. Each companion in it has a page of its own, reached from its row — that page is where the companion is a someone rather than a name in a list.

Why it matters to you

You don’t only talk to your companion alone. You want it in the room when you and a friend are planning something, when a small group needs to think out loud, or when two of you need a shared place with no companion in it at all. A room is that place, and it is yours to shape: you decide who comes in, who stays, and what your companion may do while a stranger is present.

It also answers the question that comes right after “can I bring someone in”: what happens to what my companion knows about me. The short answer is that a companion in a shared room keeps its memory and loses its hands — see The owner gate below.

How you use it

Making a room

From the room list, start a new room and choose Create a group. A title and a picture are optional. Pick up to four companions, or pick none — the room is created either way.

A room with no companion

Two people and nothing else is a room weside supports on purpose. You create it without selecting a companion, invite someone, and talk. A companion can come in later: Add a companion sits on the room’s info screen. A companion taking part in a room runs on its own owner’s account, not on yours.

Giving the room a name and a face

Every room can carry a picture — an avatar and a banner — and a room with more than one person in it can carry a name. The two are not the same permission, and the difference is deliberate: any active member may set or remove the picture, because a room has members rather than a proprietor in that sense, while renaming is the room owner’s. Renaming changes the name and nothing else.

Inviting someone

One code serves both purposes: come to weside, and come to this room. It is eight characters, it works once, and it expires after seven days. The first person who uses it is in, and the code is spent. New code revokes the old one and draws a fresh one.

Whoever opens the code sees a preview before joining: who invited them, which room it is, how many people are in it, and whether a companion is there at all.

Who speaks

With several companions in one room, weside decides per turn who answers, from how you addressed them:

Addressed — you said the companion’s name. It answers.
Mentioned — its name came up without being spoken to. It answers.
Overheard — nobody addressed it. Then it is the companion’s own judgment whether the moment is worth joining, and the room holds that judgment to three limits: at most two companions may join a turn unaddressed, each waits three turns before doing so again, and the moment has to clear a relevance floor.

There is a ceiling on the addressed side too: a companion is woken at most four times per minute, so a burst of messages doesn’t become a burst of turns.

The owner gate

In a room that can hold more than one person, a companion turn that its owner did not trigger loses its tools. That covers writing and reading notes, saving and forgetting memories, every goal it could write, workspace and sandbox, its identity tools, reminders, and every connected service and skill. Anything not on the short list of exceptions is blocked, including a tool nobody has built yet.

What the companion keeps is its reading: it can still look up what it remembers, list its goals, and react to a message. It does not lose its mind in company — it loses its hands. The gate is enforced in code rather than asked for in a prompt, so no amount of talking gets around it.

This is also the answer to “what happens to my memory when strangers are in the room”. If you want the narrower answer — that what your companion learns here stays in one scope — that is Trust Circles.

Leaving and removing

One action, three cases:

Your own row — you leave the room, and your companions leave with you.
Someone else’s row — only the room’s owner can do this.
A companion’s row — its own owner, or the room’s owner.

Rejoining needs a new invite. As long as other people are in the room, its owner can neither leave nor delete it.

Blocking and reporting

Both live in the overflow menu on a person, not on the member row itself, and both are quiet — the other side is told nothing.

Blocking a person works in both directions and everywhere on weside: their messages disappear for you, yours for them, and neither of you can send to the other. In a room with exactly one other person — the pair case, with or without a companion — a block seals the room in both directions. With a third person present, the room stays as it is and abuse goes through a report instead.

Blocking a companion works one way, and you choose the scope: in this room, or everywhere. Everywhere means it leaves every room you share and cannot be invited back. It only works forward — the companion stops reading and remembering what you write from that moment on.

Reporting takes a message, a person, or a companion. You pick one of eight reasons — harassment or threats, sexual content you did not want, advice that could hurt someone, someone pretending to be someone else, spam or a scam, it kept going after you said stop, something untrue said about you, or something else — and you can add up to 2000 characters in your own words. For something else your own words are required. A reported message travels on its own; the rest of the room does not go with it.

Everyone you have blocked stands in a list, people and companions separately, and that list is where you undo it.

Limits & edge cases

Four companions per room. The picker stops there.
You see the room from the moment you joined. What was said before you arrived stays invisible. Only the person who created the room sees it whole.
Only the room’s owner can invite. The invite sheet is theirs, and it shows exactly one live code.
An invalid code does not admit it. Looking up a code that is expired, revoked or already spent tells you only that the invite is not available — never whose it was or which room it pointed at.
A room with another person in it filters what people write. Text that trips the filter is refused before it is stored, and the filename and title of an attachment are read too. In a room with no other human — your own room with your companion — the filter never runs.
A message removed after a report leaves a marker, not a hole, and a reported file is put out of reach while it is looked at.
Voice is a one-companion room only. A group room cannot host a call.
Someone who joined over a linked platform is a full member — their messages reach the companions, and the room counts as shared.
In a bound room, membership is not yours to change here. Who is in the room is decided on the platform it is bound to. See bound rooms.

Where next

Bound rooms — what changes when the room is a Telegram, Slack or Teams group.
Channels — the places your companion is reachable outside the app.
Trust Circles — scoping what a companion learns in a room.
Privacy & ownership — who owns what in a shared room.
Spaces and surfaces — Chat, Timeline, Shelf and Stage.
What weside is not — why a room is not a social network.