A private messenger. 1:1 chats, group chats, and open communities — no email, no phone number, no ads. That's it.

No. We know "generate a seed phrase" and "create an identity" sound exactly like a wallet-draining scam flow, and that's a fair thing to be suspicious of.

Hollow doesn't hold any money or ask you to connect a wallet. The seed phrase is just how your account works instead of an email + password — there's no server-side account to sign up for, so a cryptographic key pair has to stand in for one. Your seed phrase never leaves your device and is never sent to us.

Click Create Identity. Hollow generates a cryptographic key pair for you on the spot — no form, no verification email, nothing to type in. Your 24-word seed phrase is your account.

No — and nobody can, including us. There's no email or phone number tied to your identity to send a reset link to. That's the tradeoff for not collecting one in the first place: write your seed phrase down and keep it somewhere safe, the same way you'd treat a house key.

Yes — log in on the other device with the same seed phrase. Your friends list, profile, and chat history sync over automatically.

For 1:1 chats and group chats — yes. Every message is encrypted with a real key exchange (ECDH) and AES-GCM, with forward secrecy (a fresh key per message) so that even a compromised device later can't unlock past messages.

Communities are the one deliberate exception — see below.

For 1:1 and group chats: only encrypted ciphertext passes through our relay. We can't read the contents, and we don't try to.

For communities: message text is encrypted at rest, but — because open, many-member spaces don't work with the same pairwise encryption as a 1:1 chat — the relay holds the decryption key. That's disclosed directly in the app with a "Not encrypted" badge on every community. It's defense in depth, not the same confidentiality guarantee as your 1:1 and group chats.

1:1 and group messages aren't kept server-side beyond a short delivery queue for when you're offline — once delivered, they're gone from our end.

Your chat history is also backed up automatically, so a new device can recover it. That backup is a single encrypted blob, sealed with a key derived from your own identity's private key. We store the ciphertext; we can't decrypt it.

Never — not to sign up, not to recover an account, not ever. Not because we're generous, but because we never collect it in the first place. There's nothing to leak, sell, or hand over to anyone who asks.

A group is a small, invite-only chat (up to 20 people) that's fully end-to-end encrypted, same as a 1:1 chat.

A community is a larger, open space — closer to a Discord server, with rooms, moderators, and public browsing. It trades full end-to-end encryption for that openness, which is disclosed up front.

A public timeline, like X: short posts with photos, likes, replies, reposts and quotes, open to everyone on Hollow. Tap someone's name to see their page and follow them; the Following tab shows just the people you follow. The bell shows your activity — who liked, replied to, reposted, quoted or @mentioned your posts, and who followed you — and, if you've turned on notifications, you'll get those on your phone or desktop too (who did what, never the post itself). You can edit a post in its first hour; edited posts say so.

Write @username in a post to mention someone — they get notified, and tapping it opens their page. Write #word to tag a post; tapping a hashtag anywhere shows every post that used it. The bookmark icon on a post saves it to your own Bookmarks list (behind the icon next to the bell) — nobody else, not even the post's author, can see what you've bookmarked.

Links get a preview card. Hollow's server fetches the page, never your browser — opening the Feed doesn't tell every linked site your IP address.

Posts are public and not end-to-end encrypted — the relay stores them so anyone can read them, the same trade Communities make. Nothing about your chats changes: those stay end-to-end encrypted. Post only what you'd be fine with anyone seeing.

Before your first post you agree to a short set of rules: no nudity or sexual content (and never anything sexual involving a minor), no harassment or hate, no one's private details, no spam or scams. You can delete your own posts any time. Anyone can report a post; one reported by several people is hidden straight away until it's reviewed, anything breaking the rules is removed, and an account that keeps breaking them can be banned from posting (it can still read and chat). Blocking someone also hides their posts from you.

Where you find communities to join. Pick a few interests and the list puts the communities that match them first. Your interests stay on your device and are never sent to Hollow. Communities are public and not end-to-end encrypted, so Hollow and anyone who joins can read what's posted in them.

Right-click a message (or press and hold on a phone) and choose Report message. That works in 1:1 chats, groups and communities. You can also report a person from their profile, a whole community with the flag in its header, and a Feed post from its menu.

Reports go to Hollow's moderators, and the person you report is never told who did it. Hollow can't read your 1:1 or group chats, so when you report one of those messages, your device sends that one message's text along with the report, and nothing else from the conversation. Anything that breaks the rules is taken down, and an account can be banned from posting on the Feed or from Hollow entirely.

If someone is bothering you, block them too. The report dialog has a box for that. Blocking is immediate and silent.

Work in progress — it isn't available to buy yet. The idea is an optional, one-time paid tier for cosmetic and quality-of-life extras: bigger uploads, custom backgrounds and notification sounds, community themes, and similar. Nothing about privacy or security will ever be gated behind it.