A calm chat inbox that only shows what is for you

Why chat feels exhausting

A busy community server can produce hundreds of messages a day. Most are not meant for you, yet the app shows them all with the same badge and the same sound. The cost is not the reading; it is the constant low-level question of whether something important just went by.

Yappio treats that question as a design problem. The app should know the difference between a conversation you are free to follow and a message that is waiting on you, and it should show you only the second kind in one place.

What lands in For you

The For you inbox is a single list. An item appears there because of something a person did that involves you directly. The planned list of triggers is short on purpose.

• Someone replied to a message you wrote.
• Someone mentioned you by name.
• A voice note was sent to you, with its transcript already attached.
• You were invited to an event or a room.

A list with an end

Infinite feeds are built to keep you scrolling. The For you inbox is built to finish. When you have dealt with the items, it shows a plain line saying nothing else needs you. That sentence is the feature: permission to stop looking.

Items clear when you open them or when the conversation moves on. You do not manage a backlog, and there is no unread count to chase down to zero.

Channels stay quiet by default

Channels still exist, and you can read them whenever you like. They simply do not demand attention. A channel does not badge or sound unless you ask it to, so the choice about what interrupts you stays with you rather than with the loudest room.

If you do want to follow a channel closely, you can turn on alerts for it. The default is calm, and the calm is the point.

How the list is meant to behave

The For you list is designed to be short enough to finish. It holds direct replies to you, mentions that name you, voice notes sent to you and invitations. Each item can be opened, answered or dismissed, and dismissing it removes it from the list for good. There is no unread count that grows in the background, because a number that only goes up teaches people to stop looking at it.

When the list is empty, the app says so plainly. That empty state is a feature rather than a missing screen: it is the signal that nothing is waiting for you, so you can close the window without wondering what you missed.

What we are still deciding

Some edges are not settled. One is how to treat a message that is addressed to a whole group you belong to, such as an announcement for all members. It is addressed to you in a loose sense, but putting every announcement on the list would bring back the noise the list exists to avoid. We lean towards letting each server decide which announcements deserve a place, and showing the rest in the channel as usual.

Another open point is time. A reply that waits for a week may no longer need an answer. We would rather let items age out gently, with a way to bring them back, than leave a pile that nags. Both decisions will be written up on the blog when they are made, and nothing on this page is a promise until the app is released.

Who it is for

People who belong to several communities and cannot keep up with all of them. Moderators who need to see the messages that mention them without wading through the rest. Anyone who has muted a server just to get some peace and then missed the one message that mattered.