A support group. A source. A family on hard news.
Onym is a group messenger built so the people running it can’t see who’s talking, when, or that anything was said at all.
the part that’s easy to miss
Encryption hides what you said.
It doesn’t hide that you said it.
If you’ve heard that messengers like WhatsApp or Signal are “encrypted”, that’s about the words themselves — the company can’t read them. What stays in the open is everything around the words: who you wrote to, when, how often, for how long, who else is in the group, when the conversation started, when it stopped. The company hosting the chat sees all of that. Most companies write it down.
For a lot of conversations that doesn’t matter. For some, it’s the more sensitive part.
three things that already happen
Not in a thriller. Today.
An engineer at the company can pull up your account. They can see every group you’re in and when each one was active. They probably won’t. They can.
An account gets suspended — sometimes for a real reason, sometimes by mistake. Years of conversations, the people you were in groups with, a whole part of your life: all of it lives behind a login that no longer works.
A leak, a hack, or a court order doesn’t have to expose what you said. It only has to expose who you talked to. For most people, that map is the more revealing one anyway.
what changes
Less to trust.
Less to take.
Onym is built so engineer access, lost accounts, and exposed contact maps are no longer possible — not because we promise we won’t do them, but because the system isn’t set up to.
There is no Onym account to suspend.
Your access is twelve words generated on your phone, never shared with us. There is nothing on our end to lock, nothing for anyone to ask us for, nothing for us to lose. If you switch phones, you carry the words.
When you write to your group, you don’t say who you are.
Your phone proves “I belong here” without saying which member you are — like proving you know a password without ever speaking it. From outside the group, every message looks the same. From our side, we can’t tell either.
Your messages travel as sealed envelopes.
A courier carries them through the network. The courier can see the envelope is sealed; they can’t open it, and they can’t change what’s inside. You can switch couriers any time, for any reason.
The rules of your group are written in the open.
Who’s in the group and what each person can do is written somewhere everyone can see, where no one — not even us — can change it quietly. If something changes, it changes in public. The chain sees the group’s size class — small, medium, large — not the count of people in it.
honest, on the same page
What Onym can’t do for you.
We’re telling you this here because the rest of the site does too. A privacy product that lists only its strengths is a marketing brochure, not infrastructure you can rely on.
- If your phone is compromised, none of this helps. Whoever has the phone has the conversation.
- An adversary who can watch the entire internet at once can still learn things from traffic patterns. Onym alone is not enough against that.
- In a group of three, knowing “someone in the group spoke” narrows it to three people. The math gets stronger as groups get larger.
- There is no independent audit yet. The cryptographic building blocks have decades of public scrutiny behind them; the way we’ve put them together does not, and hasn’t been checked by anyone outside the project. We’ll say so when it has.
- If someone in your group takes a screenshot, that is a person problem. No app can solve it.
two doors
If any of this fits a conversation you’ve actually had —
Pick the door that matches where you are right now.
Open source. No company in the middle. Built so the trust isn’t yours to extend.