Rooms, stages, a neighborhood, a shared canvas. All anonymous.
A privacy-first forum, and a virtual world led by users.
Nothing is sold here.
Content is chronological. There is no system deciding what you should or shouldn't see.
You get a generated username. No personal information required.
This runs on donations. There are no stakeholders to answer to.
A world, not just a website.
Most forum software is just threads and replies. Channels has a virtual world you can walk through: hub spaces with real characters, synchronized cinema rooms, a neighborhood with homes you can claim, and a shared canvas that the whole community draws on.
Walk into a stage room and play piano, guitar, bass, violin, saxophone, or drums. Everyone in the room hears what you play, live.
Load a YouTube video and every person in the room watches the same thing at the same timestamp. One person hosts; the room follows.
One pixel per user every 60 seconds. Sixteen colors. The canvas is persistent. It belongs to everyone who has ever placed a pixel on it.
Claim a home. Furnish it with instruments, a canvas, a TV. Give people keys to visit. It's yours as long as you come back.
What the server knows. And what it doesn't.
Channels was built on the assumption that a platform should collect as little about you as possible. This section states exactly what the server stores, how your IP is handled, and where the limits of that protection are.
Your generated username, an Argon2id hash of your passphrase, and an Argon2id hash of your passitems. The raw passphrase and passitems are deleted from the server the moment they are displayed to you during signup.
Content you create: threads, replies, pixels on the shared Paintit canvas, your avatar configuration. Home and neighborhood data if you claim a home.
A session token. Sessions are stored server-side and are deleted automatically when they expire.
The account contains nothing that connects to your real identity.
Your IP address is used for rate limiting: the server enforces limits on signup attempts, sign-in attempts, and WebSocket connections. These counters are held in server memory and are not written to your account record in the database.
The Caddy reverse proxy writes standard HTTP access logs, which include the IP address of each request. This is default web server behavior. Your IP is not linked to your account anywhere in the database.
- Your account cannot be traced back to an identity you use elsewhere. No email or phone number is required.
- The site runs no third-party analytics, advertising networks, or tracking cookies.
- Fonts are served from this server.
- Content is served without any mechanism to identify you to other users by IP or device.
- Your ISP can see that you connect to channels.zone.
- Caddy writes standard HTTP access logs, which include the IP of each request.
- Cinema rooms embed YouTube videos. If you watch one, Google receives your IP and may set cookies.
A username is generated for you. Then a passphrase. Then 11 random words. The signup requires no personal information and takes about 30 seconds.
Your credentials exist on your screen once, during signup. There is no "forgot my password" flow because there is no email address to reset to. If the credentials are lost, the account is gone. This is a feature, not an oversight.
Browse the forum. Walk into a hub room. Claim a home in the neighborhood. Customize your avatar. Every account starts the same.
None of this is readable until you're inside. Threads, hub rooms, neighborhoods: all of it requires an account. Creating one takes 30 seconds and requires nothing from you except a piece of paper to write on.
- Notification system improved
- Chat system improved
- Hub mechanics improved
- Mobile support improved
- Neighborhood system updated
- Transportation improved
- Border guards added
- Guide system improved
- Instrument mechanics improved
- Instrument designs improved
- More customization items added
- User channels improved
- Instrument mechanics improved
- Moderator label added
- Remember Me feature added
- Spam prevention system added
- User profiles added
- h/paintit converted to a free shared canvas
- Hub lobby rooms added
- Hub NPCs added
- Station system improved
- New avatar customization items added
- Landing pages updated
- Mobile compatibility issues fixed
- Security improved
- Initial release
Keep this place running.
Channels runs on donations alone. Every month the server bill gets paid out of pocket. When it doesn't, this disappears. If Channels is worth something to you, crypto is the only way to support it, and every contribution, whatever the size, goes directly toward keeping the lights on.
ETH
USDT
BTC
ETH and USDT share the same ERC-20 address. Verify the network before sending.
Something broken?
Murph
Find him inside the app. He'll point you in the right direction.
Bug reports go through the in-app form. Sign in, open the menu, and use the bug report option. Reports go directly to the developer. For anything else, reach out by email.
channelssupport@proton.me ↗