Rooms that are always open
You do not want to be matched with one stranger; you want a room that is already going, about something, with people who come back. And you want to see who is in it before you walk in.
Rooms that never close, one per topic, with a rules card at the top and a headcount you can see before you walk in.
The rooms
- The quiet room: mic off, camera off, a shared timer, a one-line status.
- Practice English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, and Dutch: one room each, with a language tag.
- Night owls: Americas; Europe and Africa; Asia-Pacific.
- New in a country.
- Carers (adults only).
Every standing room has a rules card of its own pinned at the top, collapsible, and posted as the first line when you join; a question of the hour is pinned with it. Nobody owns these rooms and nobody inherits them, so there are no owner controls, votes to go private are refused, and shared video is off.
How it works
- Pick a room. The headcount and how many are watching are shown before you walk in.
- Pass the selfie age check, once. A moment at your camera, read by software on Lumi's own servers and checked by a person. The photo is deleted the moment a person has reviewed the check, and after 90 days at the latest whatever happens.
- Watch first if you like. You count as watching until you send a message, a file, or a reaction, or turn on a camera or a mic. Watching is not hiding: you are in the roster. When you are ready, one tap posts "Hi, I've been quietly listening" as your first line.
The safety facts
- Every person in a room has passed the selfie age check. Teens (13 to 17) have the same rooms in their own lane, except Carers; the two lanes never meet, and teen rooms are never counted or listed publicly. The headcounts on this page are the adult rooms'.
- A room holds up to 20 people, with 4 on camera at a time; everyone else is in by voice and text.
- Nobody sees your IP address: audio and video are relayed through Lumi's own servers.
- Lumi does not record rooms. Automated screening on Lumi's own servers may sample camera frames and check text to catch abuse; what gets flagged is kept as evidence for 90 days and reviewed by a person, the rest is discarded.
- Leave at any time, mute anyone so you see and hear nothing from them, and Report in one tap; a person reads every report. Bans stick to the device and the connection, and a ban is never lifted for money.
- No account, no ads, no trackers, no data sale, and no third-party vendors.
What Lumi is not
Standing rooms are not broadcasts and not recordings. They are calls, with a few people at a time, and they are empty sometimes. The headcount is honest.
Why the rules are pinned
A field experiment on large online communities found that pinning the rules where newcomers see them raised the share of newcomers who joined the conversation by about seventy percent (Matias 2019). A study of anonymous topic rooms found that they lowered people's hesitation to speak and led to real contact afterwards (Nooks, 2023).
Sources: Matias, "Preventing harassment and increasing group participation through social norms," 2019; the Nooks study, 2023.