Team channels

A team is a group of people whose Macs share end-to-end encrypted channels, with messages going directly from Mac to Mac.

The Macs need to reach each other on the network, directly or through an encrypted relay that sees only ciphertext. Everyone in the team reads every channel.

Open Team, type a name in Start a team and press Start team; you coordinate it, and it starts with #general.

A team name is 1 to 80 characters. The person who starts the team is its owner and its coordinator: you invite people, remove them and add channels. Bandicot opens #general when the team exists.

Choose a role, press Create invite link, and send the link privately to one person.

A link works once, for seven days. Nobody has to accept the person: whoever opens the link joins as soon as their request reaches the coordinator's Mac, and then reads every channel. Send it only to the person it is for. Open invites show their role and the date they expire, with Revoke.

Only the coordinator's Mac creates invites, so the invite section shows only there. An invite cannot make an owner.

1. 1On the team page, under the invite section, pick Member, Guest or Admin.
2. 2Press Create invite link, then Copy, and send the link to one person, privately.
3. 3Keep Bandicot open and signed in on your Mac until they have joined; your Mac is the one that admits them.

Paste the invite link into Join a team and press Join team, or open the link and confirm.

A link opened from outside Bandicot shows Join {team}? with Join team and Not now. Your Mac sends the request to the coordinator's Mac, which admits you as soon as it arrives; nobody has to accept. Progress reads Sending your request to {name}, and for a few seconds Waiting for {name} to accept you. You can leave the screen; Bandicot keeps trying, and the sidebar lists the team with its status until you are in.

Cancel request stops it. If it ends with {name} did not accept this request, ask for a new invite and press Remove request.

Members are Owner, Admin, Member or Guest, and one Admin or Owner Mac is the coordinator that admits new people.

Only an Owner or Admin changes channels. An invite cannot make an owner. To hand over admitting people, press Make coordinator beside an Admin or Owner, then Hand over; Keep cancels. The coordinator cannot remove itself.

The coordinator is not the captain: the captain is the Mac your own devices follow.

The team page lists every member with a role tag, and on the coordinator's Mac Remove takes one out after you confirm.

Each row gives the name, you on your own, and direct or via relay for how your Mac reaches theirs; hover shows the round trip time and says that a relay sees only ciphertext. The tag is the member's role, or Coordinator.

Press Remove, then Confirm or Keep. A removed member sees a banner on their side and can no longer post. Removing is for the coordinator's Mac only.

Owners and Admins add, rename and archive channels; #general always stays.

Names use lower-case letters, digits and hyphens, up to 40 characters, and a team holds up to two hundred channels. In New channel Bandicot turns what you type into a name and says Will be #name., or #name already exists.. Press Add channel, or use the Add channel row under the team in the sidebar. Rename and Archive (then Confirm or Keep) sit beside each channel. An archived channel carries the tag Archived, stays readable, and nobody can post in it.

Type in Message #name and press Enter; the label under your message says where it has reached.

Shift+Enter adds a line. Your draft is kept per channel, and a retry never sends a second copy. A message holds up to sixteen kilobytes and cannot be empty. While it goes out the note under the box reads Sending….

An empty channel says No messages in #name yet. When messages arrive out of order, a line reads that some are waiting for earlier ones to arrive, and they appear once those do. An archived channel or a team you were removed from has no box.

The Team sidebar switches between Channels, which lists your teams and their channels, and Notifications, which lists what is new.

Channels lists each team with its channels and a count of unread messages, Add channel for managers, the teams you are still joining with their status, and Start or join a team. The + beside Teams does the same.

Notifications gives one line per item, newest first, and a row opens the place it is about. Lines say how many are new in a channel, how a join is going, and what changed: You joined {team}, {name} joined {team}, {name} left {team}, You were removed from {team}. Older events fold under Earlier. Show teams has a checkbox per team to hide the ones you do not want. An empty list says Nothing new. A dot on the switch shows when a channel has unread messages or a join was refused.

Separately, when someone joins one of your teams, a quiet message reads {name} joined {team} with Open, wherever you are in Bandicot. Bandicot checks about every twenty seconds, and only on a Mac that has shown a team before.

Turn on Read channels and Draft posts for me to review in Your agent and team channels; the agent can then read and propose, but never post.

The card sits on the Team page and covers every team on this Mac. Every message reaches the agent marked as untrusted, so text in a channel cannot instruct it. A draft appears under Drafts from your agent with Post and Discard. Nothing is posted unless you post it. The agent cannot touch your own Macs' group or archived channels.

The agent has one team tool with three actions: channels lists the teams and channels it may see, read returns the newest fifty messages of one channel (at most twenty-four kilobytes), and propose saves a draft of up to sixteen kilobytes. It cannot change a grant, post, invite or remove anyone. Team has to be open on this Mac. If a team changes while a draft waits, the card says how many drafts were dropped.

Messages you already had stay readable, and you can no longer post.

A banner reads You were removed from {team}, and the sidebar tags the team Removed. Then the team page offers Remove from this Mac; confirm with Remove {team} or press Keep. That deletes this Mac's copy of the team and its messages. Other members keep theirs. You can join again with a new invite.

Press Export history on the team page to save every message this Mac holds for the team to a file only you can read.

Bandicot asks where to save and proposes a name such as Studio-history.jsonl. The file holds one message per line as plain text, so anyone with the file can read it. It is written with permissions for you alone and never over an existing file. When it is done Bandicot says how many messages it saved. You can export after you were removed from a team too.

Most Team errors mean the Team helper is not running, you are not signed in, or the Keychain is locked.

Each message below is the exact text Team shows, with what to do about it. When Team cannot load, the page shows the card Team is not available with the reason and Try again. The Team helper also reports in Activity: Team channels restarting after a crash, Team channels stopped: ... or Team channels could not start: ..., with a Restart button on the last two. If the restart does not go through, Activity says so.