What it looks at

Five ordinary things, and a hard stop after that.

Emberside notices who has drifted. To do that it needs to know something, and the question is how little. The answer is five things people do out loud, in front of the group, on purpose.

What it looks at

Public acts. Things the group already saw you do.

  • Turning up to a gathering
  • Saying yes, or saying no
  • Asking the group to pray
  • Praying for someone else
  • Posting in the group chat

What it never looks at

Not configurable. There is no setting that turns these on.

  • Opening the app, or how often
  • How long you spend in it
  • Whether you have read a message
  • Where you are
  • Anything from your other groups

None of this is a score, and there is nothing to earn. Nobody is ranked, no number is shown to the group, and a quiet month does not undo a year of Tuesdays. The short list on the left exists so the list on the right can be absolute — the app looks at almost nothing, which is what lets it promise it looks at nothing else.

Four rules underneath

The parts that are easy to promise and hard to build.

Leaving a group is not deletion

Leaving removes your place in the room and touches nothing anyone wrote. Ten people carried that request; the record of it is partly theirs. Only deleting your account erases your words, and it leaves the thread standing so the replies beneath it survive.

Archiving is not deleting

Setting a request aside takes it off the wall, keeps every word, and brings it back whenever you want. Deleting is a different control, it says what it destroys, and it asks twice.

Being listed is not an open door

A church may show that a group exists. That is not permission for a stranger to request a place in it. You are in because a leader handed you a code.

The address stays with the gathering

Groups meet in somebody’s front room. A public listing carries the neighbourhood and never the street, so no one’s home address ends up on a page a search engine keeps a copy of.

Read the privacy policy