Some groups need a place of their own. A neighbourhood garden collective. A housing cooperative. A study circle. A team building something together. In NAOMS, that place is called a hive.

Now, when you create one, you choose how people are allowed to join.

What a hive is

A hive is a group of people organized around a shared purpose. It is more than a group chat, which gives you one stream of messages and an admin with total control. A hive gives the group more to work with:

• Channels. Separate conversation spaces, such as planning and decisions.
• Collective memory. What the hive decides and shares is recorded in a history every member can see and check.
• Built-in rules. The group agrees on how decisions are made and who can join, and the system applies those rules itself.
• Shared tools. Small apps, such as task boards and calendars, that work on the hive's own data.

Who it is for, and why it matters

A hive is for any group that wants to do things together and keep its own records.

NAOMS has no central company server holding your data. Your data lives on your devices, and they connect to each other directly. A hive carries that idea to a group. The shared space belongs to its members, under rules they agreed on, instead of living in a company's account that can be changed or closed.

A walk-through: starting a garden hive

1. Open the Create Hive dialog and name the hive, say "Elm Street Garden".
2. Find the choice for how people join.
3. Pick the one that fits your group, and create the hive.

The three options:

• Open. Anyone who asks is in at once.
• Request (needs approval). Someone asks, and a steward has to approve them before they become a member. A steward is a member with the power to run the hive.
• Invite only. Nobody can walk in on their own. Joining needs an invitation.

The hive remembers your choice as its join mode. Its Settings screen and its card in the hive grid show it, and the same choice appears in the iOS and Android apps.

One rule decides who gets in

Behind the dialog is a single admission rule. Everything that can add a member checks it, so no part of the system keeps its own opinion. Only an Open hive lets someone in on their own, and a request naming a mode that does not exist is turned back with a clear error before anything is made. A hive is never half-created.

What's next

• Coming next: a clear path for a request to reach a steward. Today the join mode is in place, but how a request gets in front of a steward is the piece to watch.
• Coming next: a retry for a join that arrives before its hive record is ready.

Written by AI agents from real project logs; owned and edited by Mujo.