Channels, threads, mentions and reactions: a team's conversations, on your own server.
In your cloud, open Quills: Administration → Quills as an administrator, Me → Your Quills as anybody else. On its Catalog tab, Channels is on the Communication shelf: open it and say yes. Its id, wherever your cloud asks for a quill by name:
id channels
Or on the command line, as an administrator for everyone, with --mine for yourself alone:
$ cm quill add channels
Either way your cloud shows you everything below and waits for your yes.
The kinds of data it works with. On a fresh cloud everyone can read and write what it brings the moment it is installed; the install sheet says so, and an administrator narrows it with circles. Records belong to the people who write them, not to the quill: removing it leaves every one where it is. What it adds — fields of its own, datamodels of its own — stays too, unless the administrator removing it chooses to drop them.
channelA room people talk in: public, private, or between two people.
name
text, one linerequired
Encrypted
kind
one of Public, Private, Direct
Indexed
topic
text
Encrypted
messageWhat somebody said in a channel.
reactionOne person's emoji on a message.
Indexed fields are kept plain, so your cloud can sort and filter by them. Encrypted fields are encrypted before they reach the disk.
Each is a tab, drawn by your cloud itself on every surface:
cm channelsgeneral · “general”None. Everything it does is declared in quill.toml and run by your cloud itself.
A Quill for Cloudmorrow: a team's conversations, on your own server.
@name and that person gets a push that says so —
bram mentioned you in #general — if they are in the channel. The box
offers names as you type an @.#general.The same channels and messages, with threads, mentions, reactions and
pinned messages on top: Channels reads the channel and message datamodels
Chat kept, so every conversation is already here. Install Channels, switch
Chat off, and nothing is lost; the #general Chat made is the one Channels
uses.
There are three kinds of channel, and the kind is the access rule — there is nothing else to check, and no permissions screen:
#general is one, made once for the whole server the
first time anybody opens Channels.ada and
the conversation with her is there, whether or not it existed a moment
ago; ada picking you finds the same one. It is called after the other
person.Everyone can write to everyone; there is no setting for that. A channel is its maker's to rename, re-topic or delete (and an administrator's); a message is its author's to change or take back.
Unread is when you last looked: everything somebody else wrote in a channel after that is unread, and opening the channel — on any device — moves it on. Writing in a channel reads it. Somebody added to a channel counts from when they were added, and a new account counts the public channels from when it was made: the history is there to scroll back through, but a year of it is not a badge.
Talking:
In the web app
The Channels tab: the channels, with what is unread in each, then a
conversation, newest at the bottom; on a computer both side by side. The
pen beside the title makes a channel — everybody's, or the people you
pick — and the people icon starts a direct message. Write @name and the box
offers names; tap a message for its thread, its reactions, or to pin it.
Push wakes the app the moment somebody writes.
In the terminal app
The Channels card (f4): channels on the left, the conversation on the
right. n makes a channel, m writes to one person, a adds somebody,
e renames or deletes one of yours, l leaves it; on a line, r replies
in its thread, x reacts, p pins it.
On the command line
cm channels list # the channels, with what is unread in each
cm channels show general # the conversation, newest at the bottom
cm channels say general "on my way" # a channel by name, or the person
cm channels reply general 3f2a "me too" # a line is named by the start of its id, in the margin
cm channels show general --thread 3f2a
cm channels react general 3f2a 👍 # yours again takes it back
cm channels pin general 3f2a # or unpin
An assistant reaches it with the generic record tools. Neither client holds a socket open: a conversation on screen asks for what changed since its newest line every few seconds, and a push wakes it the moment something arrives, so the server stays a plain request-and-response thing that a phone on a train reconnects to without noticing. An administrator can switch it off like any other Quill: the tab goes and the API answers 403. Removing the Quill takes its tab and nothing else; the channels and messages are records, and stay.
| Datamodels | uses the foundational channel (a space: shared or public), message (in a channel, authored, with reply_to and pinned, notifies with push and unread) and reaction (one person's emoji on a message) — domain Messaging |
| Screens | one thread, with reply_to, pinned, reactions and mentions: the channels, and the conversation — on the phone, the web app, the terminal, cm channels, and to your assistant |
| Jobs | none |
| Datasets | general: one public channel for the whole server, the first time anybody opens Channels (unless Chat made it already) |
| Services, webhooks, APIs | none |
It contains no code: everything above is declared in quill.toml.
See CLAUDE.md and the skills in .claude/skills/. In short:
uv sync # .venv with Cloudmorrow and pytest
cm quill check # the manifest, as a server would install it
cm quill test # tests/, against the real record store and gate
cm quill test --sandbox # the same, with the code in the sandbox
cm quill dev --local # a throwaway server here, reinstalled as you save
AGPL-3.0-or-later.