Connect your Space to another team

Share a channel with another organisation while everyone keeps their own Space and account. Both administrators approve the connection and choose what to share.

Before you connect

• You need an administrator account on your Space and a contact who administers the other Space.
• Both Spaces must have federation enabled and be reachable over HTTPS.
• Agree which channel you want to share and which permissions the other team needs.

A connection between Spaces is called a peer connection. Pairing the Spaces allows you to offer channels to each other; it does not share every conversation or file.

Pair the Spaces

1. Open Admin → Federation and start a connection. Generate a one-time connection key.
2. Send the key and your Space address to the other administrator through a trusted channel. The key expires after 30 minutes and can be used once.
3. The other administrator enters your address and key in their Space’s federation settings. Each of you will see the other Space’s fingerprint.
4. Compare those fingerprints over the phone or another trusted channel. Approve the connection only when they match the values the other administrator sees.
5. Check that the connection is approved before sharing a channel.

Share a channel

1. On the Space that owns the channel, open its sharing settings and select the paired Space.
2. Choose the permissions to grant, such as reading messages, posting, uploading files or inviting members.
3. Send the channel invitation. The other administrator accepts it from their federation settings.
4. Confirm that the intended people can access the channel, then send a test message and check that it appears on both sides.

People continue to use their existing accounts. Sharing with another Space does not automatically let it pass the channel to a third organisation; onward sharing requires its own permission.

Know where messages and files are stored

Each shared channel has one owning Space, also called its homeserver. It manages the channel’s history, membership and attachment storage. The other Space sends its members’ actions to that owner and receives updates.

Agree on retention, access and backup responsibilities with your partner before sharing sensitive information. Messages travel over HTTPS, but relaii does not provide end-to-end encryption. The administrators of participating Spaces can access the conversations their servers handle.

If the connection stops working

Open Admin → Federation to check the peer’s last contact and any reported errors. On the server, run:

sudo relaii doctor

Check the domain, HTTPS certificate and server clock on both sides. If an administrator has restored a backup or changed an identity key, compare the current fingerprint with the previously approved one.

relaii retries queued deliveries when the other Space is unavailable. Your local conversations remain usable. Sending to a shared channel may fail while its owning Space is offline; wait for the connection to recover, then confirm delivery before sending again.

Stop sharing or disconnect a Space

To withdraw one channel, revoke that channel’s share. To end the entire connection, revoke the peer in Admin → Federation. You can do this without approval from the other organisation.

Revoking the peer stops further requests and queued deliveries to that Space and withdraws its shared channels. It does not remove accounts from the other Space or guarantee deletion of information people have already received.