Version 2 comes to life: messaging, voice, and sync

A few days ago the desktop app was deliberately local-only - a solid foundation with workspace, identity, settings, and a full messaging client that kept everything on your machine. That foundation is now coming online. Here is what landed.

Messaging went networked. Read state is server-backed and syncs live across devices, so opening a channel on one machine clears the unread badge on another. Messages carry real display names resolved over the wire, and desktop notifications are mention-aware, with the unread count shown in the window title.

The app now holds up on a bad connection. An offline outbox queues messages while you are disconnected, de-duplicates them, and drains automatically on reconnect - with a small 'N queued' indicator so you always know where things stand. Losing Wi-Fi mid-sentence no longer loses the sentence.

Voice and screen sharing are real. We settled the call architecture on an SFU (LiveKit) with a clean two-plane split between control and media, then built the media plane itself: joining audio, device selection, deafen, and screen share, with hardening along the way. It is the start of Epic 5, arriving earlier than the roadmap promised.

Search got fast. Message search is backed by SQLite's FTS5 full-text index, with a safe fallback, and you can scope a search to one channel or all of them and filter to messages that carry attachments.

Underneath, reliability improved in ways you will never see: a versioned migration framework with automatic backup and restore means upgrades never lose data, and the server gained backup / export / import maintenance commands. A new System Status board surfaces live health inside the app's mission-control view.

All of this is still pre-release - we are at 0.1.0-alpha and building in the open. But the shape of the product is now visible: private by default, local-first, and increasingly connected on your terms. Follow along on the roadmap and on GitHub.