Shards
Your communities. Text, voice, forums, galleries, tickets, the whole set, organized with channels and roles. A Shard is your community's home base, run by its own people.
You live in the Rift.
Portals take you anywhere.
One window you can live in all day. Unless you don't like one window, then pop pieces out into a window armada.
Identity
Email? Phone number? ID?
Nah.
Registration is as simple as a username and a password. Full stop. That’s all you’ll need to use Rift, and nothing to identify you. Unless you make your username MarkJackson04221997 or something. Highly discouraged.
Lose your password? Sucks. Actually it’s fine, your Rift Key can get everything back. Lost that? Really sucks. Actually it can still be fine with optional multi/cross-device authentication. Prepare according to your forgetfulness level.
01 Signup Checklist: 1. Username 2. Password
02 What we don’t ask for: email, phone number, or government ID.
03 Rift Key: twelve words that recover your account and root your encryption.
The idea
Stop wearing down your ALT+TAB keys
Find yourself flipping between Steam, Twitch, YouTube, Discord, calendar, and the hidden Amazon window with a full cart you hide quickly when your spouse walks in? First, go talk finances with your spouse, maybe make a Christmas list to leave somewhere obvious, then come check out Rift, where all that and more is under one app.
The basic layer is a secure chat that’s full of features and customizable. Then, you can stack your Portals on top of it. Portals serve as widgets for everything from music, weather, sports, a built in web browser, and much more.
No more alt-tabbing between the scattered pieces of your day. You just live here.
Portals
Little apps that sit right next to your chat: music, weather, calendar, to-dos, YouTube, Twitch, sticky notes, feeds. Drag them wherever they make sense to you. It's your desktop, living inside your conversations.
Your layout
Drag, resize, and arrange all of it the way your brain actually works. Save layouts for different moods, or tear a chat or Portal out into its own window on a second monitor.
What's inside
The good stuff
Chat, voice, media, streaming, and tons of extras that can make the place feel like the personal command center dashboard you dreamed of as a kid.
01
DMs we can't read
Direct messages encrypted end to end. We can't read them. Not "we promise not to," we literally can't.
02
Voice that sounds good
Low latency voice with AI noise suppression. You come through clearly even when the room around you does not.
03
Gallery channels
Media-first channels with proper grid layouts, a full-size lightbox, and reactions. For art, photos, and clips that deserve better than a scroll-past.
04
Forum channels
Threaded discussion that doesn't vanish by morning. Pin what matters, tag it, and keep a thread alive for weeks instead of minutes.
05
Theme it your way
Themes, accent colors, banners, animated avatars. Rift should look like you decorated it, mostly because you did.
06
Soundboard
Soundboards for the whole Shard and for you alone, firing the instant you hit them. Chaos on tap, without wrecking the audio quality.
The business model
No ads. No data sales.
Rift is independently owned. Everything you need to chat is free. Optional subscriptions keep the lights on so we never have to sell your attention.
Want the receipts? Read the privacy policy, or check the warrant canary and transparency report.
DMs encrypted end to end
Encrypted on your device before ever leaving it. Shard messages are encrypted at rest on our side.
Automatic EXIF stripping
Location, camera model, and the rest of the hidden metadata get wiped from every image you upload, every single time.
Delete means gone
When you delete a message, the row leaves the database. It isn't archived somewhere or hidden behind a flag.
Media proxying
Images come through our edge, so your IP never touches a stranger’s server just because someone dropped a link in chat.
No behavioral profiling
Rift never assembles an ad profile of you or hands your attention to an engagement algorithm. There's no ad business to feed, so there's no reason to.
Your messages never train AI
Nothing you write or upload gets fed into a model, ours or anyone else's. There's no AI reading over your shoulder or learning from your chats.
Come live in the Rift
One window for your communities, your tools, and everything you keep open all day. It's free, and signing up takes about a minute.