Messaging in Towns

Creating and sharing engaging content that fosters genuine connection is the core of the Towns experience. So we made the messaging experience super intuitive. This guide will help you understand the different ways you can talk and hang out in Towns and explain some of the messaging nuances you may encounter. In case it needs to be reiterated — every message sent in Towns is end-to-end encrypted.

So go on and talk in private.

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*In this article we cover channel-specific permissions. For read/write/react entitlements on the Town membership level, check out Joining Existing Towns.

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End to end encryption:

Messages in Towns are end to end encrypted. This means that only the members of a channel in a town hold the keys to reading messages.

Because the system of encryption involves exchanging of keys, there may be some delay until you are able to read messages, so you might see something like this:

Screenshot 2024-10-03 at 11.45.18 AM.png

How to fix this?

  1. Make sure at least one other person is online in the direct message, group or channel. Ask the sender to check if they have an active internet connection.
  2. Refresh the app and see if your messages come through.

If none of the above fixes your issue, please file a bug report. In the iOS app, you can shake your phone to report. In the web, you can click on the ladybug icon in the top right corner of your screen.

Types of messaging:

Towns has a few ways to organize and send messages:

  1. Channels: For discussions, announcements, interests, etc. You can create a channel for anything that might be useful to your community. Channels are the broad, multiplayer comms areas for your Town. They can be public or based on entitlements. We’ll get into that later.
  2. Threads: See threaded responses to posts you’re part of.
  3. Mentions: This is where you can quickly see who’s @mentioning you.
  4. Direct Messages: Private messages, only between the members of the DMs. This can be 1:1 messages or you can create groups. If you create a group, you have the ability to add/remove people from the group as well.

Messaging Tips