A guided tour of the Harmony client, from first launch to a living community.
Every screenshot below is the real v0.2.10 release running on macOS — no mockups. A fresh identity ("Rosa") walks through onboarding, founds a neighborhood garden club, and is joined by three real peers (Sam, Priya, and Tomás) over Harmony's actual P2P stack. Everything you see — the joins, the messages, the presence dots — happened live between four independent Harmony nodes.
The first thing Harmony tells you is the most important thing about it: your identity lives only on your device. There's no account to create, no server holding your data, and no password-reset email — because there's no company on the other end.
Creating an identity mints a cryptographic key on your device. Harmony immediately asks you to back it up — as an encrypted recovery file protected by a passphrase, or as a 24-word recovery phrase you write down.
If you skip the backup, Harmony is honest about what that means. "Self-sovereign" cuts both ways: nobody can take your identity from you, and nobody can restore it for you either. (You can back up later — the app keeps a gentle reminder banner until you do.)
Your display name is how people see you on messages. It's not a unique handle and doesn't need to be claimed or registered — your cryptographic identity is what actually identifies you; the name is just a label you control, changeable anytime.
The main window: communities and direct messages on the left, the active view in the middle, and mode buttons (Messages, Notes, Vines, Files, and more) in the bottom-left. The footer shows your identity and its self-sovereign status.
The + button opens the create menu — new DMs, group DMs, communities, invite redemption, and more.
Communities come in two flavors: Open (anyone with the URL can join) and Invite-only (each invite link works exactly once — more on that below).
Every new community is born with governance built in. Note the Proposals,
Constitutional, and Charter tabs in the header, and the built-in ⚖ proposals
channel next to #general — in Harmony, community self-governance is a first-class
feature, not an afterthought.
Channels come in three kinds: Text, Voice, and Town Hall — the latter being a structured deliberation space for decisions that deserve more than a chat scroll.
Invite-only communities use one-time invite links: each link embeds the inviter's cryptographic signature and can be redeemed exactly once. Generate one from community settings, hand it to a friend over any channel you trust, and it's dead the moment they use it.
As invites are redeemed, members appear with their names and roles. Admins get moderation affordances — role assignment and removal — and the join-request panel tracks the counter-signing that admits each new member.
Messages flow peer-to-peer between members' devices — end-to-end, with no server in the middle. Rich text, emoji, replies, reactions, mentions, and file attachments all work the way you'd expect.
Every member row carries a presence dot fed by live peer-to-peer beacons. When a peer stops responding — closed laptop, dead network, wandered off — their dot honestly decays to a hollow "stale" state within about a minute, rather than lying green.
In this shot, Tomás's node has just gone offline: his dot has gone hollow while Rosa, Priya, and Sam stay solid green. Compare with the previous screenshot, taken while all four were live.
- Install Harmony: macOS · Windows · Linux · headless
- Join the alpha: grab an invite and see docs/feedback.md for how to send feedback from inside the app.
These captures are reproducible. Each scene was staged on a single machine using
Harmony's profile isolation (HARMONY_PROFILE) to run one GUI instance plus three
headless harmony-app serve peers side-by-side with the maintainer's real identity
untouched, and driven end-to-end over the localhost control API (HARMONY_API_PORT) —
the same 119-command surface the app itself uses. The GUI was operated by synthetic
clicks/keys and captured with macOS screencapture; peer joins used real
harmony://invite/... redemption over the live transport stack. To refresh the set
after a UI change, replay the same flow on a fresh profile.