Getting started without an account

Why almost every chat app asks you to sign up

Most chat apps start with a form: email, password, maybe a phone number, then a code sent by text message. There are good reasons for that. A chat service that keeps your messages on its servers needs to know who you are so it can show the same history on your laptop and your phone, let you reset a forgotten password, and keep spam accounts out of big public rooms. The account is the key to a locker the company holds for you.

A lot of the time, though, you do not need a locker. You want to talk with four friends tonight, plan a trip with your cousins, or run a quick study session. Filling in a sign up form, confirming an email and convincing everyone else to do the same can take longer than the conversation itself. And every account is one more copy of your email and phone number sitting in someone else's database.

howlden takes a different route. It has no servers that hold messages, so it has nothing to put in a locker, and it does not need to know who you are.

What you give howlden instead of an account

When you open the app for the first time, you choose two things: a display name and an avatar. That is the whole setup. No email field, no password, no phone number, no step that asks for your birthday.

Both choices are saved in your own browser's local storage, along with your settings and the list of dens you belong to. They are not uploaded anywhere, because there is nowhere to upload them: the howlden website is a set of static files on GitHub Pages with no backend, no database and no analytics. When you change your name, the change happens on your device and your friends see it the next time you are connected.

A practical consequence: names are not reserved. Two people in different dens can both be called Luna. Inside a den you know who is who because you invited each other personally, not because a server checked a username.

How friends join

If there is no account and no server, how does anyone find your den? They do not. A den is invite only, and nobody can stumble into it from a search or a public list. Joining takes six words each way:

1. You click Invite. howlden shows six words and a small QR code with the same words. Read them out on a call, or send them through whatever you already use: a text message, a messenger or email.
2. Your friend types the six words. On the Join screen of the app they type the words or scan the QR code. Both browsers use the words to find each other through public relays, and the short handshake travels sealed, so the relays only see ciphertext. The words work once and expire after ten minutes.
3. You type the confirmation words. Your friend now sees six confirmation words made from both connections. They read them to you, you type them, and they are in. A friend you already know is let in on their verified key, without this last step.

On a phone, Call a friend on the home screen makes the six words and opens the share menu in one tap. Once one new person is connected, howlden introduces them to everyone else in the den automatically, over the encrypted connections that already exist.

If you are curious about what happens under the hood, how howlden works walks through it in plain words.

What you can do once everyone is in

A den follows the familiar community chat layout, so it should feel natural right away. You get a list of text channels and voice channels, plus a member list. In text channels you can:

• write with simple formatting: bold, italic, strike, spoilers, code, quotes, lists and links;
• mention someone, reply to a specific message, and add reactions;
• share files, which travel straight from one browser to another instead of being uploaded to a cloud folder.

Hop into a voice channel and you can talk, with a ring lighting up around whoever is speaking, plus mute and deafen buttons. Camera video and screen sharing live in voice channels too. Everything travels over WebRTC connections, which every modern browser encrypts end to end with DTLS (and SRTP for audio and video). That encryption is built in and cannot be switched off.

The honest trade offs of chatting without an account

Skipping sign up is not free magic. Removing the account also removes the things an account usually pays for. Here is what to expect:

• Everyone has to be online together. No server holds messages for people who are away. When a friend comes back, members who are online share what they missed, but if nobody is online the den is quiet.
• Your setup lives on your device. Your name, avatar, key and den list are in this browser. Clearing your browser data clears them too, and there is no password reset link. Save an encrypted backup file from Settings to move to another device or to be safe.
• Small groups only. A den holds up to 5 people. Every member connects directly to every other member, and that only scales so far. A community of fifty needs a server based tool.
• Some networks get in the way. When both people are behind a strict NAT (some school, office, hotel or mobile carrier networks), the direct connection can fail. howlden tells you in plain words when that happens and lets you add your own TURN relay in settings.

For a group of friends who meet up at the same time anyway, these limits rarely matter. For a team that needs a searchable archive from last spring, they matter a lot.

When an account based chat is the better pick

It is worth being clear about this. Services built around accounts and servers are very good at things howlden deliberately does not try to do: delivering messages to someone who is offline, syncing history across all your devices, hosting large public communities, and helping you get back in after you lose a phone. If you need any of those, the account is doing real work for you, and signing up is a fair deal.

howlden fits the other case: a small, invited group, talking right now, that would rather not hand out email addresses to make that happen. Plenty of people use both, an account based app for long running group threads and a den for the evening call or a one time planning session.

Try it in a minute

There is nothing to install. Open a den, pick a name and an avatar, click Invite and read the six words to one friend. When they read the confirmation words back, you are talking. If you would rather talk than type, the guide on voice and video calls covers microphones and permissions.