The guide to private groups
Your computers and your friends’ answering each other, free, with messages between them.
The guides
Free
No credits, no account needed.
Your own computers, or friends’ you invite, answering each other’s questions directly, encrypted end to end. No credits move, and woodls’ server never sees what you ask. A desktop at home can answer the laptop you carry, and a friend’s computer can answer yours while they sleep. Private groups has the short version.
On the computer that’s on most
It holds the group’s list.
woodls group create home
woodls group invite homeThe invite shows two ways in, and waits up to 10 minutes for the other computer:
woodls group join finds the group
and asks for them. Open 10 minutes, 3 tries.woodls group join woodls:…. Good once, within 24 hours (--hours makes it shorter), while
woodls host runs on the computer that made it.woodls group invite home --spokenwoodls group join 47 river lanternwoodls group invite home --friend ashawoodls group invite home --no-waitA spoken code is a number and two words, open 10 minutes, for one try. The two computers meet at
woodls’ server, which sees the number and their addresses, never the words. A group’s name uses
the letters a to z, digits, - and _, such as home or asha-home.
No invite
No account either.
Your friend sends a link, or reads you a code. Then:
woodls group join with the link or the words. It needs nothing set up first.woodls ask --group home "…", or woodls code --group home.To lend your computer to the group as well, woodls host --no-public --group home sets it up for
private groups by itself, with a key of its own and no account; woodls init --groups-only does the
same on its own.
If you’re in another group with the same name already, the new one goes by home-2 on this
computer, or by the name you give with --as.
Free
Straight to its computers.
woodls ask --group home "…"woodls chat --group homewoodls code --group homewoodls config set group homeWith a default group, --public sends one question to the public network instead. A computer in
the group answers only while it runs woodls host --group home: see
Lend your computer.
Online now
Direct or relayed.
woodls group members homeEach computer: whose it is, which kind (a Mac, an NVIDIA computer), whether it’s online and what it
serves, whether this computer reached it directly or through a relay, with the time it took, and
when it was last seen. --here answers from what this computer knows, without asking them now.
woodls group alone lists your groups.
woodls group remove home asha-pcwoodls group leave homewoodls group delete homeInvited by name
With hours you set.
Invited with --friend NAME, a computer is your friend’s, and is served only the models woodls has
priced: gpt-oss 20B, Qwen3.6 35B and Qwen3 8B. Your own computers are served any model file. Each
friend may use a share of your computers’ time: 15 minutes an hour, saving up to twice that, and 4
hours a day, unless you change it.
woodls group hours homewoodls group hours home asha --day 6hwoodls group usageShort notes
Between your group’s computers.
woodls group message home \
"Leaving the desktop on tonight"
woodls group messages homeA message goes straight to every computer of the group that answers, and says which have it.
Only a computer running woodls host answers, so messages move while at least one of the group’s
computers hosts; a host also passes them on every few minutes. A computer that was asleep gets
them from a host the next time it runs woodls group messages or hosts. With no computer of the
group hosting, a message stays on the computer that wrote it, and woodls group message says so.
woodls group messages fetches new ones first, then shows the newest 20 (--last 50 for more)
and marks them read.
A nudge
Its owner always decides.
woodls group nudge home studioAsks the computer named studio to serve the group. Its owner always sees the ask. Only if they
let asks in, with woodls group settings home --nudges on on that computer, does it come online
sooner: a minute after their last touch instead of five, for half an hour, for the group alone.
Never while they use it, on battery, when they paused it, or outside their hours. A computer that’s
asleep or off can’t be woken. You can ask the same computer once every 10 minutes, and you’re told
what happened.
Three days
Renewed while the owner lends.
The group’s list of members is signed by the computer that holds the group’s key, and lasts 3 days.
woodls host renews it every hour while it runs there. If that computer is off for longer, the
group waits for it. On the owner’s computer, this makes it last up to 7 days; a computer removed
while the owner’s computer is off may then stay in that long:
woodls group settings home --list-lasts 7dEncrypted traffic
And addresses.
Your computers find each other through a relay and, where they can, connect directly. When there’s
no direct path, the encrypted traffic passes through a relay: woodls’ own in Mumbai, or a public
one. A relay sees your computers’ IP addresses and when they’re online, never what they say. To
find each other, lending computers publish their public key and relay address, never their IP address, to
a public directory. --relays off keeps a group to computers on one network.
On Windows, woodls runs inside WSL2, behind Windows’ own network, so the six digits are often not heard: use the link or the spoken code.