Family is plural
Most people belong to more than one family in any meaningful sense. Your immediate household. Your siblings’ households. Your in-laws. The chosen family of close friends. The family that exists across two homes after a separation.
A messaging app that forces all of that into one chat is going to fail in interesting ways. So Shoal lets you have as many families as you need, on a single account.
How it works
When you log in, Shoal shows you a list of the families you belong to. Tap one to enter it. The conversations, members, devices, and encryption keys all switch with you.
Each family has its own:
- Encryption keys, isolated from every other family
- Members and admins, with no overlap of permissions
- Conversations, accessible only to that family’s members
- Settings, including who’s an admin and who’s a child
Switching is fast — your device already holds the keys for each family it belongs to, so changing families is local, not a server round-trip.
What you keep across families
Your account, your name, your magic-link email, your push notification subscription. The things that are about you persist. The things that are about a family don’t leak.