What is a relay?
Unlike a pure peer-to-peer system that requires both devices to be online simultaneously to exchange packets, EmberChamber routes messages through a hosted edge relay. The relay acts as a mailbox, holding incoming messages until your device connects and pulls them down.
Why is the relay necessary?
Mobile operating systems put background apps to sleep to save battery, making pure peer-to-peer synchronization highly unreliable on mobile. The hosted relay ensures that your direct messages, group updates, and invites are safely queued and delivered as soon as you open the app or receive a push notification ticket.
What the relay CAN see
We do not claim "zero metadata" because that is operationally impossible for a routed delivery network. The relay coordinates, and therefore observes, the following:
- Account Identifiers: Your account registration address, associated public keys, and device names.
- Social Graph Details: Which spaces or rooms you belong to, who invited you, and who you invite.
- Delivery Metadata: The time ciphertext envelopes are queued and acknowledged, and the IP address your device uses to connect to the endpoints.
- Temporary Ciphertext: The encrypted content payloads, which remain stored in delivery queues until they are pulled.
What the relay CANNOT read
Because message payloads are encrypted end-to-end on the clients before reaching the network, the relay is technically unable to read:
- The plaintext content of your direct messages.
- The title, text, or content of device-local search terms.
- The plaintext conversations and history of new groups.
Current beta limitations and caveats
EmberChamber is in a public beta stage. You should understand our temporary operational boundaries:
- Attachments Caveat: While web companion attachments are encrypted client-side before upload to cloud storage, native attachment flows (on mobile and desktop) currently upload raw bytes through temporary tickets. We are actively migrating native attachments to the browser E2EE standard.
- Legacy Compatibility Paths: Older groups and rooms may still utilize legacy compatibility schemas where history is stored on the relay to facilitate synchronization. Make sure your active circles transition to our new device-encrypted groups to bypass hosted history reads.
If you want to read more about how groups coordinate keys, check the Encrypted Group Chat Guide.