VOIDEX Channels Guide: Private, Public, Text and Voice Rooms

Every community eventually outgrows a group chat. The conversation splits into topics, people want to talk live, projects need their own space, and the question of who can read what becomes important. Most platforms answer that question quietly, in their favour: the company can read everything, and so can anyone who breaches it.

VOIDEX Channels answer it out loud. They are the community spaces of VOIDEX, the invite-only, end-to-end encrypted platform owned by CNOTA. A channel can be private, in which case it is end-to-end encrypted and only its members can read it. Or it can be public, in which case it is open to every member, is not end-to-end encrypted, and says so. You always know which one you are in.

This guide explains what VOIDEX Channels are, how private and public channels differ, what text and voice rooms offer, and how channels are built for real communities.

What a VOIDEX Channel is

A VOIDEX Channel is a community space with its own rooms. There are text rooms for chat, voice rooms to talk live, and workspace rooms such as boards and maps. Anyone on VOIDEX can create one.

Think of a channel as a building and its rooms as the floors inside it. A small team might need one text room and one voice room. A large community might need dozens, grouped by topic, with a quiet room for announcements and a lively one for everything else. The structure grows with the people using it.

Private channels: end-to-end encrypted with MLS

Private VOIDEX Channels are end-to-end encrypted, like VOIDEX Messenger. They are joined by invitation or by request, and only members can read what is said inside.

The encryption behind private channels is MLS, the Messaging Layer Security protocol standardised by the IETF as RFC 9420 in July 2023. MLS was designed for exactly the problem channels create: keeping a conversation encrypted as members join, leave and change devices, without the cost growing out of control as the group gets larger. It is an open standard, reviewed in public, rather than a private invention. Our explainer on MLS group encryption goes deeper into how it works.

Three things follow from that design.

• Keys are created on members' devices. VOIDEX's servers store only public keys and ciphertext. VOIDEX cannot read a private channel.
• Device keys are checked in public. Every device key change on VOIDEX is appended to a public, append-only key transparency log, with tree heads signed by Ed25519 and ML-DSA-65. Clients refuse keys that are not in the log, anyone can audit it through public endpoints, and an independent witness watches it. A key cannot be slipped into a channel quietly.
• The cryptographic core is open. You can read it at github.com/voidexbycnota/voidex-crypto, and the VOIDEX security report explains every claim and how to verify it.

For a working group, a family, a founding team or a circle of friends, a private channel gives the structure of a community platform with the privacy of an encrypted messenger.

Public channels: open, and labelled

Public VOIDEX Channels are open for every member to discover, read and join. They are how a community grows beyond the people who already know each other: a fan community, an interest group, a place for a brand to meet its audience on equal terms with everyone else.

Public channels are not end-to-end encrypted. That is not an oversight; it is the point. A room meant to be read by anyone who walks in cannot also be sealed to a fixed set of keys. What matters is honesty about it, and VOIDEX labels public channels clearly, so nobody mistakes an open room for a private one.

The same rule applies across VOIDEX. What is private is end-to-end encrypted, with keys on your devices. What is public is labelled as public. You should never have to guess.

Choosing between them

A simple test helps. If the conversation would be harmful, embarrassing or commercially sensitive in the wrong hands, make it private. If the conversation is meant to be found by people you have not met yet, make it public. Many communities run both: a public channel as the front door, and private channels for the people doing the work.

Text rooms and voice rooms

Inside every channel, rooms are where the conversation actually happens.

Text rooms are for chat: messages, replies and the ongoing thread of a community. A channel can hold as many as it needs, one per topic, so the conversation about next month's event does not drown out the conversation about today.

Voice rooms are for talking live. Drop in, speak, listen, leave. They are the closest thing a digital community has to a room where people simply hang out, and they turn a channel from a message board into a place.

Workspace rooms such as boards and maps give a channel somewhere to organise, not just talk: plans, lists and shared work that sit alongside the conversation rather than scattered across other apps.

Channels built for real work

A new channel can start as a standard channel, or as a music, film, automotive or gaming channel. Each starts with rooms suited to that kind of work:

• Music: sessions and tracks, for writers and producers working on songs together.
• Film: scenes and call sheets, for crews planning a shoot.
• Automotive: route planning and a live convoy map, for drives planned and taken together.
• Gaming: match planning, for teams and friends who play together.

These are starting points, not walls. A channel can shape its rooms however its members need.

Operations: projects inside a channel

Larger channels can be split into operations: separate projects inside one channel, each with its own rooms and its own members. A studio might run one operation per production. A club might run one per event. People can be part of the operations that concern them without being drawn into all the others.

How VOIDEX Channels fit into the Voidverse

VOIDEX Channels sit between the private and the public halves of the Voidverse. On one side is VOIDEX Messenger, fully private, with one-to-one and group chats and voice and video calls. On the other is VOIDEX Space, the social feed where members post as their public Face or their anonymous Phantom. Channels borrow from both: the privacy of the messenger when you want it, the openness of Space when you do not.

They also share VOIDEX's principles. There are no ads in channels, no third-party trackers, and nobody can pay to push their channel in front of other members. VOIDEX is free and will remain free, so a community built here is not a community being monetised behind its back.

Getting started with a channel

If you are creating your first VOIDEX Channel, a few decisions make the rest easy.

1. Decide private or public first. It shapes who can find the channel and what can be said in it.
2. Start small. One text room and one voice room is enough for most new channels. Add rooms when conversations start to collide.
3. Pick a starting type. A music, film, automotive or gaming channel gives you useful rooms from day one.
4. Use operations for projects. Keep separate work separate, with its own members.
5. Invite deliberately. VOIDEX grows by invitation, and so do the best communities.

Open the door

VOIDEX Channels give a community somewhere to live: private rooms protected by an open standard, public rooms that tell you they are public, voices as well as text, and space for real projects to run.

VOIDEX is invite-only. Ask for access and start your channel, or read how VOIDEX encryption works before you invite your community in.

Sources

• IETF, RFC 9420, The Messaging Layer Security (MLS) Protocol: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9420
• VOIDEX cryptographic core (open source): https://github.com/voidexbycnota/voidex-crypto