Questions people ask

What is room.md?

room.md is a personal space on the web that you choose for its mood. It is a picture of a room, and the things in the picture are real: the notebook opens your journal, the clock keeps time, the radio plays. You keep a journal in it and let the people you choose visit.

What do you do in a room.md room?

You write. The journal is the centre of the room, and everything else is there to make writing somewhere you want to be: put out a clock, a note, your own photographs, the weather outside, the sound of rain. You arrange only what you use.

Is room.md free?

room.md is free to use. It is early, and everything in it is open to anyone who makes a room: the rooms themselves, the journal, the assistant and the sound. If that ever changes, it will be said here first.

Is room.md a journal app?

The journal is at the centre of it, but room.md is not a notes app with a picture on top. You pick a room for how it feels, the objects in it do things, and the journal is what you keep there. People come back for the room and stay for what they wrote in it.

Who can read what I write in room.md?

You decide for each entry. An entry can be private to you, visible to friends, or open to anyone who has your room's address. Nothing is public by default.

Can friends visit my room?

Yes. Every room has an address of its own — room.md/your-name — and you can send it to anyone. A visitor arrives into the room as you keep it, with your light and your weather, and reads the entries you have opened to them.

Can I look at other people's rooms?

At room.md/visit, yes: the rooms whose owners opened them to anyone, the most recently written-in first. You arrive into the room as its owner keeps it — their light, their weather, their hour — and read the entries they opened. Nothing is listed there until somebody opens their own room.

What is the one question for everyone?

Every day room.md asks everybody the same question — what today smelled like, who you were glad to see — and you answer it in your own journal. The answers people opened to anyone appear together at room.md/today, in a different order every time, with no counts and nothing to reply to, and tomorrow the page is empty again. It is the only place here where strangers meet, and it lasts a day.

Will my room show up in Google?

Only if you opened it to anyone. A room kept to yourself or to friends is not readable by anything — no search engine, no AI crawler, nothing without your permission. An open room is a public page like any other: it is at room.md/your-name, it carries your name and the entries you opened, and Google and the AI crawlers read it. Close the room and it drops out again.

How do I choose a room in room.md?

There are sixty-eight rooms and you pick by mood rather than by name. The picker offers the words the rooms are described in — cosy, calm, focused, grand, lonely — and the places they are in, each with the number of rooms behind it. You can also search for a thing you can see, like rain or a desk.

Do the rooms change between day and night?

Yes. Every room is painted twice, at noon and after dark, and the two are the same room at two hours rather than two pictures. It can follow your own clock, or stay at the hour you prefer.

What can I put in a room?

A clock that also keeps a timer, a note on a screen, your own photographs in the frames on the wall, the weather outside the window, your files, and something to listen to. Each one is an object in the picture, not a panel over it.

Is there ambient sound or music in room.md?

Yes. A room can play internet radio — thousands of stations, sorted by what a room is for — or its own ambience. It is one thing at a time on purpose: a room with rain and a fireplace and a radio all at once is a mixing desk, not a room.

What can the assistant in room.md do?

It lives in the room rather than in a sidebar. It reads the files you keep there, knows the weather outside your window, can arrange the room for you — put a picture in a frame, set a timer, start the radio — and can carry out tasks on a schedule.

Can I read books in room.md?

There is a shelf in the room with about fifteen hundred books on it, in six languages, all of them out of copyright and taken from Project Gutenberg. You read inside the room rather than in another tab, and the room remembers the page you stopped on.

What is the quest?

A gamebook played through the rooms, at room.md/quest/vespers. You wake at night in a scriptorium: a letter in cipher on the desk, and a chest that wants a word. The choices are things in the picture, and the wrong one can kill you. It is early — one quest so far, in five languages.

Does room.md work on a phone?

A room you have been sent reads well on a phone: the journal and the artwork are made for it. Your own room, where you arrange the objects, is designed for a wide screen, because the objects are places in a picture and a picture needs room.

What languages does room.md speak?

English, Russian, Romanian, Spanish and Italian, throughout — the interface, the names of the things in each room, and the mail it sends you.

Where is my data kept?

On room.md's own servers. Nothing you write is sold, and nothing is used for advertising. The only things kept on your device are what the site needs to sign you in, plus your theme and language if you agree to it — the banner asks before anything optional is stored.