A place where you can talk securely with others and keep dozens of tools right next to the chat.
Channels for every way people talk in a community, from quick banter to threads that run for weeks.
50 MB uploads and 8,000-character messages on the free tier. GIFs, custom emoji, rich text with code blocks and tables, link previews, message search with filters, and camera in any voice channel. Translate a message in place when someone writes in a language you don't read.
Fast, organized text chat. Split topics into channels so a conversation stays easy to follow instead of one endless scroll.
Low-latency voice with Tachyon, the noise suppression we built ourselves, so your mechanical keyboard and your roommate don't come along for the call. Works in the browser too. 128 kbps audio, free.
Stream your screen or a single window at 1080p 60fps, free. Rift+ takes it to 1440p. Switch what you're sharing mid-stream without dropping, and friends can preview a stream on hover before they hop in.
An always-on-top HUD that shows who's in your call and who's talking, so you never have to alt-tab to check. Summon it from anywhere with a global shortcut, drag it to a corner, and let clicks pass through to what's underneath when you need to. Mute, deafen, camera, screen share, and the soundboard are all one click away.
Click a launcher channel and a fresh voice room spawns just for your group, auto-named (sometimes hilariously), with the same access rules as the launcher. Rename it if you like; it deletes itself the moment the last person leaves. No graveyard of dead voice channels, no bot to set up.
Your DM text is encrypted on your device before it leaves. We can't read it, and that's the point.
Call a friend with voice, video, or your screen, on desktop or your phone. The call is encrypted end to end, same as the messages.
Whisper to one person mid-call and only they hear you, while you both still hear the room. In chat, start a whisper with someone for a side conversation in the channel that only the two of you can see.
Private group chats for three or more people, with the same disappearing and scheduled messages you get everywhere else. Splinters are encrypted on our servers rather than end to end, so we tell you that plainly instead of hiding it.
Threaded, long-form discussion that doesn't scroll away by lunch. Tags, flair, pinning, and voting for guides, questions, and the stuff worth keeping.
Media-first channels: grid layout, full-size lightbox, keyboard nav, reactions. For art and screenshots that deserve better than a thumbnail.
Read-only channels for the things everyone needs to see, without forty replies burying it two minutes later.
Schedule events with RSVPs, cover images, and a linked voice channel. Everything across your Shards lands in one calendar you can export to Google or Apple.
Set messages to delete themselves after a while, per channel. When the timer's up they're gone from the database, not just hidden from your screen.
Write it now, send it later. Handy for announcements, reminders, or catching a friend in another timezone without staying up for it.
Post a form in a channel and collect real answers. Applications, signups, feedback, bug reports. Replies land in one place instead of scattered through a thread, and nobody gets sent off to a Google Form.
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Some things should not live in a conversation that scrolls away by morning. These channels hold the parts of a community that need to stay put.
A real wiki inside your Shard. Write pages, sort them into sections, keep drafts until they are ready, and park the files everyone keeps asking for. Publish any page to the open web, readable without an account and, if you want, by search engines.
Boards for the work your community owes itself. Assign it, block it, archive it, drag it around, and turn a support ticket into a task without leaving Rift.
A channel that is one document. Good for a rulebook, a guide, or anything people are meant to read rather than scroll past. Sort them into folders, and drop in a whiteboard when a page needs a diagram more than a paragraph. Every doc keeps a version history you can compare and restore.
Start a sprint in a Docs channel and everyone writes against the same timer, each in their own document. Word counts land at the end, ranked sprints are optional, and a join card lets others jump in.
Status cards that keep themselves current. Point your tools at a board and it shows what is true right now instead of a pile of old alerts.
A channel that lists people instead of messages. The roster is derived rather than typed in, so it keeps itself current as people join, leave, or change roles. Good for a staff page, a team lineup, or a cast list that would otherwise go stale a week after you write it.
A channel that is a shortcut. Put your rules doc, your store, or your stream where people already look for it, right in the channel list.
Meet people without the cold open of joining a random server and hoping for the best.
Small rooms, up to 8 people, with text and drop-in voice. They spin up, run for a session, and disappear. No dead channels piling up forever.
Browse by what you're into: Gaming, Music, Tech, Creative, Sports, Film & TV. You get matched with people on the same wavelength, so it doesn't feel forced.
Not feeling the room? One click drops you into a new one. No guilt, no awkward goodbye.
Be fully anonymous, show your Now Playing, or share your interests. You pick, it's all opt-in, and it resets every session.
Little apps you arrange right next to your chat. Your whole setup in one window.
Run Apple Music from your layout: skip, pause, see the album art, and let Now Playing show friends what you're listening to.
Live radar via Windy.com, with current conditions at a glance. No signup or API key required.
Your Shard events and personal events with iCal sync, so you see what's happening across your communities and your life in one place.
Watch streams and videos docked next to chat. Start a Watch Party and the whole group stays in sync, one host driving, nobody leaving the conversation. On desktop, play the portal's audio straight into your voice channel, so everyone hears the same thing without anyone streaming.
Personal task lists sitting right next to your chat where you'll actually see them.
A built-in RSS reader. Follow blogs, news, and changelogs without leaving Rift.
Crypto and stock watchlists with live quotes in your layout. Track BTC, ETH, AAPL, NVDA, whatever you follow, no brokerage login.
Thousands of internet stations by genre, plus local stations near you, with a sleep timer and favorites that sync across your devices. It streams straight from the broadcaster. Start a listening party so friends hear the same station, or on desktop, play it straight into your voice channel.
Sync your Steam library and browse it by playtime, genre, or co-op. Compare libraries with your crew, then run a Game Night vote to settle on what to play. A Free Games tab watches Steam, Epic, and GOG for free-to-keep games and can alert you when a new one shows up.
A live hardware HUD in your workspace: CPU, GPU, RAM and VRAM, temps, disk and network, with theme-reactive gauges. Desktop app only, since it reads your machine directly.
Also available:
Your group is already here, so it may as well be where you do things together. These are newer and rough in places, and we label them that way.
A music studio built into Rift. Record, arrange, and mix with MIDI and effects, then share what you made with the people already in the room. It records podcasts too.
Small games to play with your Shard: Coil, Merge, Ricochet, Bulwark, Vector, Starship, and chess, with daily puzzles and leaderboards worth arguing about. Plus Flashpoint, a growing shelf of classic Flash games.
Run a campaign without a pile of browser tabs. Scenes, maps, and system packs live in the channel, and everyone is looking at the same board.
AutoMod, tickets, analytics, and audit logs are already part of Rift, not bolted on by a third-party bot that can go down at 2am and take your moderation history with it.
A live owner and mod dashboard: real-time mod feed, growth stats, a message-activity heatmap, a searchable member table with bulk kick, ban, and unban, a short-lived deleted-message log (12 hours for self-deletes, 14 days for mod removals, then purged), edit-history lookup, and a permissions audit trail with one-click revert. It's the kind of analytics you'd normally pay a bot subscription for, already built into Rift. That data belongs to your Shard, not our ad business.
Word filters, invite blocking, spam protection, slowmode. Test every rule in a live sandbox before it goes live, so a bad filter never eats a real conversation. It can answer, too: pick a keyword and AutoMod replies with text or a GIF, so nobody has to answer the same question twice.
A proper three-state model, allow, deny, or inherit, with per-channel overrides and an inspector that tells you exactly why someone can or can't do something.
Every automod trigger and manual action in one searchable feed. Filter by user, date, or action. Your whole team sees the same history.
Per-channel slowmode that mods skip automatically, plus timeouts with a duration you set. Small tools for specific headaches.
Structured reports with categories and status tracking, and a path to escalate the serious stuff to the platform when it needs it.
Ignore quiets someone without blocking them: their messages, typing, and pings get out of your way. When two members can't get along, an owner can separate them so each disappears for the other in that Shard, and leaving and rejoining doesn't undo it.
Support tickets as a built-in channel type: an organized private thread per issue, opened with a click instead of a bot command.
Post a panel and let people pick their own roles with a click: teams, pronouns, interests, notification opt-ins.
Opt-in XP from chat and voice, with anti-AFK and anti-spam caps so it can't be farmed. Hitting a level hands out real roles or unlocks channels, and everyone gets a rank card and a leaderboard. Level-ups show up as a quiet toast instead of another message in the channel. Free for every Shard.
Prize draws with the math to back them up. Each one publishes a cryptographic commitment up front and reveals the seed at the draw, so anyone can check it wasn't rigged. Set entry rules, hand out codes only the winner can see, auto-draw at the deadline, and reroll if someone goes quiet.
Catch join spikes automatically, gate new accounts by age, and flip on raid mode the second things go sideways. The presets cover the common cases, so the fast response is also the easy one.
When an owner deletes their account, gets banned, or disappears from Rift for 60+ days, ownership passes to the best remaining member automatically: admins first, then highest role, then longest around. Using Rift at all keeps your shards yours; only a community left untouched for 180+ days changes hands while its owner is still around. Nobody has to beg support for the keys, and the community keeps running.
Pipe notifications from tools you already use straight into your channels. Rift takes Discord’s webhook format plus GitHub and Slack, so your CI and alerts keep working when you move over. 5 free per Shard, 15 on Ember, 30 plus file uploads on Forge.
When your creators go live on Twitch, Rift drops a rich card in the channel you pick: title, game, thumbnail, optional role ping. It updates itself to 'ended' when the stream stops, and viewers can jump into a Watch Party without leaving. It's wired into Twitch's EventSub directly, so the card lands the moment the stream does.
Paste a Discord server template link and Rift rebuilds the whole structure as a new Shard: categories, channels in order, forum tags, roles with their colors and order, and every permission rule that has a Rift equivalent. You get an editable preview first, so you decide what lands before anything is created. Structure only, not messages or members, and your Discord server is never touched.
Link up with communities you trust. Members can browse across them without those Shards going public, and you can share a moderation notice board so trouble in one is not a surprise in the next. Everyone keeps their own roles, rules, and staff.
Named groups for your roles, so a long list reads like sections instead of a wall. A Fragment can be handed its own channels and managers, and grouping on its own never gives anyone permission to do anything.
Hand someone a role when they earn it, and take it back when they stop. Set the rule once on messages or reactions and Rift grants and revokes on its own. Most bots only do the granting half, which is how "active member" ends up meaning nothing.
Also in here:
Signup is a username and password. What you share beyond that is your call.
Twelve words, generated at signup. It's your account recovery, your identity, and the root of your encryption keys, all without an email or phone number ever being on file.
Your DM text is encrypted on your device before it's sent. Only you and the person you're talking to can read it, on any device you sign in to. We don't hold the keys.
Community messages are encrypted at rest on our servers. Shards and Splinters aren't end-to-end encrypted, but their stored messages aren't sitting in plaintext either.
We keep what's needed to run your account and enforce safety, and nothing past that. Nothing quietly building a profile of you underneath the app.
Speak as a character. In channels the owner turns it on for, pick a name, avatar, and color and post in-character or anonymously. Great for roleplay or running NPCs. It never detaches a message from its real author behind the scenes, so reports, AutoMod, and bans still work.
Themes, layouts, and profiles that turn the app into your place, for you and for your Shard.
Built-in themes plus Atmosphere effects, mixed however you like.
Hand-built themes that reskin the whole app instantly, each previewing live before you commit. Push further with custom colors, gradients, background images, and glass, or just pick one and move on.
Pick an accent that fits your mood or your brand. Subtle or loud, up to you.
Banners, animated avatars, and a profile that looks like you.
A drag-and-drop bento grid for your profile: Now Playing, a media gallery, polls, an extended bio, your links, and more.
Soundboards for the whole Shard and for you personally, for quick clips in voice. Fun without hijacking the room.
Dock presets (Classic, Streamer, Productivity, Cockpit), 2 saved layouts free (8 with Rift+), and focus modes for chat, media, or the whole cockpit.
Tear any chat, DM, or Portal out of the main window. On desktop they become real OS windows: drag one to a second monitor, pin it on top, then dock it back with a click.
Mute, deafen, push-to-talk, leave voice, or fire a soundboard clip, straight from an Elgato Stream Deck. The official plugin talks to the desktop app over a local, token-secured bridge. Needs Rift desktop and Stream Deck hardware.
Download pluginGive your Shard its own emoji, with more slots as your Shard tier grows. Animated custom emoji are a Rift+ and Founder perk.
Your own emoji, tied to you instead of a Shard, so they follow you into every Shard and DM. More slots with Rift+, and animated personal emoji are a Rift+ and Founder perk, same as Shard emoji.
Voidkitty: a pixel-art cat that lives in your workspace. It roams between panels, naps on your sidebar, chases your cursor, and climbs the edges. Keep it in a Portal or let it wander. Free for everyone. Rift+ adds more cats, dogs, a falcon, dragons and a turtle. It only reacts to where your cursor is, never to what you type.
Living animated backgrounds for the whole workspace: drifting nebula, pond ripples, snow, embers, matrix rain, and more. Some react to your cursor, and a dial takes it from barely-there to bold. Layers over any theme and respects reduce-motion.
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Find communities, jump anywhere in a keystroke, and decide when Rift gets to bug you.
Browse a directory of communities that chose to be found, ranked by plain activity numbers. Filter by interest, preview before joining, or Step Through one at a time. Any Shard can list itself for free, with no member minimum.
Ctrl or Cmd+K jumps to any Shard, channel, or DM, opens a Portal, or dives into settings, all from the keyboard.
Drop into a Shard and get your bearings: recent activity, pinned announcements, who's in voice, member count. Dismiss it once you're caught up.
One inbox bell for the things you'd otherwise miss: account and Shard notices plus Rift-wide announcements, in one place instead of scattered everywhere.
Desktop toasts for DMs, mentions, and live alerts that show up even when Rift isn't focused. A burst of messages from the same person collapses into one updating card instead of stacking spam. Click one to jump straight to the conversation.
Schedule do-not-disturb windows and Rift goes quiet across everything, in-app, desktop pop-ups, overlays, then comes back on by itself.
One switch hides NSFW Shards, plus any you add, from your Shard bar. It's set per device, so the work laptop stays clean and nothing changes at home.
Also in here:
Chat apps split your day across tabs and platforms. Rift puts it back in one window.
There's no profile of you being built anywhere, no ad targeting, nothing sold to a broker. What you say here stays here.
Rules are posted, not implied. When a mod takes action it lands in a log, so nobody wonders why they got banned.
A Shard runs however its owner wants to run it. Rift builds the tools; what a community does with them is up to them.
Rift treats you like an adult, because that's all we allow here.