NETTRASH.FamilyConnect

Family Connect is a private messenger for one family and nobody else — no feed, no discovery, no directory of users. The only people who can reach you are the ones your family's owner let in. It works out of the box: install, pick a username — no email address, no phone number — then create your family and become its owner, or join one with an invite code. The owner decides whether that code admits people instantly, needs approval, or admits nobody, and can rotate it, cap the membership, or remove someone. What makes Family Connect different is where your messages live. There is no vendor cloud: every installation talks to one Family Connect server. Out of the box that is the default server we operate — and on it, we hold your family's messages and files. But the server software is free and open source (MIT, written in Rust), and "Change server" on the sign-in screen points the app at any other one. Put it on your own hardware and your conversations exist in exactly two places: your server and your family's devices. Day to day it works like any modern messenger: - One shared chat for the whole family, and a private one-to-one chat with any member of it - Photos, videos, voice notes and files of any kind — up to ten on a message, drawn as one album you swipe through and pinch to zoom; uploads carry on in the background - Take a photo or video without leaving the chat, or send one in from another app - Your location sent once, drawn on a map, only when you choose — never continuously, never in the background - Polls in the family chat, with every open one a tap away; a board anyone can move of notes, photos, events with who is going, and task lists - Replies, threads you can open on their own, @mentions of anyone in the family, editing what you have sent, and reactions from a picker of hundreds of emoji - One-to-one voice and video calls that ring on the lock screen and land in the Phone app's Recents; link a member to a contact and call from their card — that link never leaves your device - Real-time delivery with typing indicators, read receipts in one-to-one chats, and unread counts that agree on every device - Notifications when messages arrive while the app is closed — and none while you are already reading - History kept on the device, so you can read it back with no signal - Report a message or a member to your family's owner, who can remove them — a report about the owner goes to whoever runs the server instead - Block anyone: their messages fold behind a row you can tap, their chat leaves your list, their calls never ring you - Eight languages in nine localisations, Serbian in both alphabets What it does not have: ads, analytics, tracking, crash reporting, or the attribution SDKs a free messenger usually arrives with. The one piece of third-party code in it is Google's open-source WebRTC library, (BSD), which carries calls and nothing else. And the honest limits. This is not end-to-end encryption, and we will not imply it is: messages and attachments travel encrypted to the server your family chose — plain http only for a server on your own network — and are stored there readable, so whoever runs it can read them. Calls are different: picture and sound go straight between the two devices wherever the network allows; where it does not, the call connects only if your server's operator runs a relay, which forwards it encrypted and cannot read it. Some things necessarily reach past your server: the map under a shared location and link previews, both switchable in Settings; a public STUN server, asked for your address when you place a call; and Apple's push service, which carries the message text into a notification unless your server's operator turns that off. There is no message search yet, and how long old messages are kept is the server operator's setting. If you want your family's conversations off big-tech servers — and, when you are ready, on hardware you own — this is what Family Connect is for.