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The worlds & privacy

Everything you share on Main's World lives in one of three worlds. The world you choose decides who can see it. That's the whole privacy model, and it's meant to be simple enough to hold in your head.

The three worlds

  • SKY — public. Anyone on Main's World can see it.
  • LAND — your connections. Only people you've connected with can see it.
  • DEEP — private. It's yours alone… unless you tag someone in.

That's it. No confusing settings, no per-post checkboxes buried in a menu. You pick a world, and the world tells you who's there.

Tagging opens a door

Tagging someone you're connected with lets them see a moment they otherwise couldn't — a private (DEEP) moment becomes visible to the people you tag. Tagging never makes something more public than the world you chose; it just invites specific people in.

Ghost dots: seeing that something is there

The map never shows you a moment you're not allowed to open. But it can show you that something exists. Small, faint dots — each wearing the color of its world — mark moments that are out of reach from where you're standing:

  • Moments in a world other than the one you're viewing, including your own — handy for spotting where your tapes live across the worlds.
  • Connections-only (LAND) moments from people you haven't connected with yet.

A ghost dot is deliberately empty. It can't be opened, and it carries no photo, no label, and no name — nothing about who posted or what. For moments you aren't allowed to open, even the spot is softened to a rough area rather than an exact point. And private (DEEP) moments never appear at all, not even as a dot, to anyone who wasn't invited in.

Ghost dots are an invitation: the world is fuller than your slice of it, and connecting with more people — in person, as always — opens more of it up.

Sometimes the person you want to show a moment to isn't on Main's World at all — a parent, a friend abroad, anyone without the app. For that there's the special link.

As the creator, you can share one of your tapes (or a vibe you're part of) as a special link — an ordinary web link that opens that one thing, view-only, in any web browser. The person you send it to doesn't need World App, doesn't need an account, and doesn't see anything else of yours.

A few things keep this honest:

  • Only the creator can make one. Nobody else can open a window into your private worlds — not even the people already allowed inside them.
  • Watching only. A special link never lets anyone appreciate, comment, or join. It's a window, not a door.
  • You can kill it. Revoke a special link at any time and every copy of it, everywhere, stops working immediately.
  • One thing, not your world. The link opens the single tape or vibe it was made for. The rest of LAND and DEEP stays exactly as walled as before.

Messaging your connections

Once you and another Main have connected, you can message each other through World Chat — World App's own end-to-end encrypted chat between verified humans. A small chat button appears beside each of your connections; tapping it opens a drafted conversation in World Chat, and nothing is sent until you choose to send it.

One honest trade to know about: reaching someone on World Chat works through their World App username, so once two Mains connect, each can see the other's username. That link exists only between the two of you — never for pending requests, never for strangers — and it mirrors what connecting already means here: you met in person and chose each other. To everyone else, you stay anonymous.

Your identity: real, and anonymous

Main's World is built on a promise that sounds like a contradiction until you see how it works: everyone is a verified human, and everyone stays private.

  • We never ask for your name or your email. Ever.
  • To join, you confirm you're a real, unique person through World App, using a zero-knowledge proof — cryptography that proves something is true (you're a verified human) without revealing the details behind it (who you are).
  • Because each real person can only hold one account, there are no bots and no fake accounts — while you remain anonymous.

So the feed is full of real people, and none of them had to give up their privacy to be there. That combination is the foundation the rest of Main's World is built on.

Next: Tapes — how you share a moment.