Secret Communities in 📝MythOS are 📝Communities that leave no trace at normal community URLs: to anyone who is not a member, a secret community is indistinguishable from one that does not exist. A steward-created join link is the deliberate exception for people holding that live invitation token.
Invite-only has never meant undiscoverable. A space can require an invitation and still confirm its own existence to anyone who guesses its address — which is precisely wrong when the membership, or the fact of the group at all, is the sensitive part.
It is for private cohorts, internal teams, support and recovery circles, and any group whose existence is itself confidential.
Key Capabilities
- Indistinguishable from nothing — non-members get the ordinary not-found page at normal community and post URLs.
- Absent from every index — excluded from search, discovery, community listings, sitemaps, and AI crawler files.
- No name in normal metadata — the page title and link preview carry nothing, so a pasted community or post link reveals no name.
- Steward-granted entry only — membership comes from a steward's per-person invite or live join link; there is no request-access path.
- Join links disclose only the invitation target — the join-link page can show the community name and description to the token holder while ordinary community URLs reveal nothing.
- Full community parity — posting, voting, discussion, moderation, and forking behave exactly as elsewhere.
Getting Started
- Open your community and go to its Settings page.
- Under Visibility, choose Secret, then save.
- Invite people from the Members section, or turn on Join link under Visibility and copy the generated link.
- Confirm it from the outside: open the community URL in a logged-out browser and you should get the not-found page.
- Confirm the invitation path separately: the join link should show the community name and ask the holder to sign in before joining.
FAQ
- What does someone see if they already have the community link? The same not-found page a made-up URL would give them. Nothing distinguishes the two.
- What does someone see if they have a join link? While the token is live, the join-link page can show the community name and description and ask them to sign in before joining.
- Can someone ask to join? No. Requesting access exists only for 📝Private Communities; a secret community answers as though it is not there, so there is nothing to ask.
- Does sharing a post from a secret community leak anything? No. Post URLs answer not-found for non-members, and no title, description, or preview image is generated for them.
- What happens to pending access requests if I switch a private community to secret? They are closed automatically, since the moderation queue only exists for private communities and a pending request could otherwise sit unseen forever.
- Can I change a community's visibility later? Yes, at any time from Settings. Existing members keep their membership through the change.
- Do I need a paid plan? Creating a community requires 📝Scholar or 📝Oracle tier; choosing its visibility costs nothing extra.
Related
- 📝Private Communities — the sibling mode, invite-only but shareable behind a request-access gate