Real-time
Everything happens while it's happening.
Messages, reactions, typing and presence travel over a live connection, so everyone sees the same moment at the same time.
- Lena joinspresence → online
- Presence updateseveryone sees it
- Typing indicatorlive, not polled
- Message landsno refresh
- Reaction appearsfor everyone at once
- Notificationto the person mentioned
What you can do
01
Instant delivery
Messages land without a refresh.
02
Typing indicators
See when someone is answering.
03
Live presence
Online, idle and do-not-disturb, as they change.
04
Appear offline
Use Ballastra without broadcasting your status.
In practice
A welcome that actually lands
A newcomer joins and shows up online for everyone. A moderator sees them typing in #introductions, the message lands, reactions follow, and the person they mentioned gets a notification — all in the same few seconds.
Live delivery, not polling
Everything in Ballastra updates over a live connection rather than a refresh. A message sent in a Space appears for everyone in it at the moment it is sent; a reaction lands as it happens; someone joining a voice room is visible the instant they do. For a community, that immediacy is what makes the place feel inhabited rather than archived.
This matters most in the moments that actually matter to a community — coordinating a release, running a hackathon, deciding something fast. The information arrives while it is still useful rather than on whatever interval a refresh loop happened to tick.
Typing indicators and read state
Realtime also includes the subtle signals. Typing indicators show when someone is composing a reply, read state shows whether a message has been seen, and presence shows who is online right now. These are small details that add up to a conversation that feels live, the way an in-person room does.
For builders running a community around a project, that means knowing at a glance who is around to help, who has seen the message about the deploy, and who walked away. Presence is information teams actually use, even when they do not consciously notice it.
Presence you can control
Realtime presence does not have to mean "always visible". Ballastra includes an appear-offline mode, so you can use the app without broadcasting your status to every community you are in. Being present is a choice, and the choice is yours rather than the network’s.
This is part of a broader position Ballastra takes seriously: signup needs a username, an email and a password — no government ID, no facial scan, no age-estimation prompt — and presence is something you control rather than something you are tracked by.
Common questions
Messages, reactions and typing indicators are delivered over a live connection rather than by polling, so they land as they happen rather than on a refresh interval.
Yes. Live presence shows who is around, and typing indicators show when someone is composing a reply.
Yes. An appear-offline mode lets you use Ballastra without broadcasting your presence to the rest of a Nexus.
See it live in your community.