Concepts
A quick tour of how thinge is put together. If you have used Slack or Discord, most of this will feel familiar — the one real difference is how voice works.
Channels
A channel is a place where a group talks. There are two kinds:
- Voice channels — always-on rooms you stay in. Joining one is like walking into a room where your team is already sitting; you can talk without setting up a call. This is the main idea in thinge.
- Text channels — the familiar scrolling message feed, for links, decisions, and anything worth keeping around.
Channels can be public (any member of the server can see and join) or private (limited to invited members).
Always-on voice
This is the main difference from other tools. In most, voice is a call: someone starts it, everyone joins, it ends. thinge treats voice as ambient presence — you are simply present in a channel, and speaking takes no setup, so a quick "hey, got a second?" is easy.
Under the hood, audio is standard WebRTC forwarded by the server so everyone in a channel hears everyone else; echo cancellation runs on each client. You control your own microphone (mute) and speakers (deafen) at any time.
Text, reactions, and attachments
Text messages support Markdown (bold, lists, links, code blocks), emoji reactions, and image attachments. Messages render the same everywhere — browser, desktop app, and mobile.
Replies and topics
Reply to any message and your reply shows inline, quoting what it answers — click the quote to jump back to the original.
When a reply thread gets going — a few messages back and forth between at least two people — thinge turns it into a topic: a named strand of the conversation. Topics form on their own; there is no "start a thread" button. Each one gets a name (from its opening message, or from an optional AI titler your server admin can enable), and anyone can rename it.
A topic is a lens, not a folder — messages stay in the single channel feed; a topic is just a saved view over them. A channel shows its recent topics as chips at the top: click one to filter the feed to that strand, drop a stray message into a topic with Add to topic, or switch on Group by topic to read the channel as coherent conversations instead of a live stream. Quiet topics fade from the strip (they are always still in search), and a new message brings one back.
Direct messages
A direct message is a private one-to-one conversation. It behaves like a channel with just the two of you — same messages, reactions, and real-time delivery — but no one else can see it.
Presence
Presence shows who is around: who is online, and who is currently in which voice channel and talking.
Screen sharing
You can share your screen into a channel — useful for walking through a problem while you are already talking in the same room.
Transcription
Voice can be optionally transcribed to text (speech-to-text), so spoken conversation leaves a searchable, skimmable trace.
Notifications
thinge can reach you when you are not looking — web push to browsers and installed mobile apps, plus optional in-app sounds — for direct messages, @-mentions, and replies to your messages. You can set each channel to notify you about everything, only mentions, or nothing. See Get the app for enabling notifications on your phone.
How it compares
- vs. Slack — Slack is text-first; a huddle is a deliberate action. thinge inverts that: voice is the default, always-on layer, and text is the async companion.
- vs. Discord — the always-on-voice model is Discord-like, but thinge is self-hosted: you run the server, so you own the data (including your customers' conversations), with EU data locality by default.