Private chat
A private chat for the people who work in a repository. Messages are encrypted and travel between the participants — Sync helps open the connection and stores nothing you send.
The private chat belongs to a repository. Connect one, and the people who already work in it can talk inside Sync — about the spec they are implementing, the decision someone just overturned, the thing that broke in CI. The conversation lives where the work does, instead of in a separate tool that knows nothing about either.
It is the one part of Sync that needs an account: you sign in with GitHub and
subscribe. Everything else — your knowledge, the roadmap, the whole .sync/
directory — stays local and free.
Who can join
Access comes from GitHub. Anyone who has access to the repository can open its chat; add a collaborator there and they are in, remove them and they are out. There is no second list of members to keep in step with the first, and no invitations to chase.
Sync re-checks that access with GitHub before it lets a participant in, so someone who lost repository access loses the chat with it.
How private it is
Messages are encrypted and travel between the people in the chat. Sync helps open the connection and stores nothing you send — there is no message history on our side to hand over, lose, or mine.
We cannot promise the route is always a straight line between two machines. When a direct connection cannot be established — a NAT or a firewall in the way — the traffic goes through an intermediate node instead, still encrypted: that node relays bytes it cannot read. What holds either way is that the messages are encrypted between the participants and that we keep no copy.
The desktop app joins with a member certificate — it proves you are a current participant without a browser sign-in. You authenticate once on the web to set the repository up; after that the app talks for itself.
Turning it on
Connect the owner on GitHub
Sign in with GitHub on your Sync account page and install the Sync GitHub App on the account or organization that owns the repository. That installation is what connects the owner to Sync.
The App asks for read-only Metadata and nothing else. It can see that a repository exists and who collaborates on it; it cannot read your code.
Add the repository
Pick the repository you want the chat for. Its collaborators become the people who can join.
Subscribe
The chat is the paid part of Sync, and you subscribe from the same page.
Open it in the app
In the desktop app, open the same repository. It picks up the chat for that project and joins with your member certificate — no second sign-in.
Good to know
- Nothing about the chat touches your repository. No files are written to
.sync/, no commits are made, and message history is not stored anywhere by Sync. - GitHub stays the source of truth about who can join. Permission to join is short-lived and re-checked with GitHub, so revoking someone's repository access closes the chat for them too.
- Sign-in may still be limited. While payments are being finished, sign-in can be restricted to a small group of early testers — if you are turned away, that is why, and nothing is wrong on your side.