@ -8,7 +8,7 @@ I'm [`gravel`](https://codeberg.org/gravel/gravel), a Session user who has made
[Session Communities](https://getsession.org/faq#open-groups) are chat rooms available in the [Session Messenger](https://getsession.org/). Communities are hosted by individuals on instances of the [Session Open Group Server (SOGS)](https://github.com/oxen-io/session-pysogs).
As with all Session chats, they communicate with apps solely through onion routing. Session Communities also include their own file hosting, contrary to direct messages and closed groups, for which the hosting is provided by the Session team. Contrary to DMs and groups and owing to their unlimited user capacity, the content in Communities is not end-to-end encrypted, which should come as no surprise. Session Communities represent part of the same trend as [Discord servers](https://discord.com/) or [Matrix chatrooms](https://matrix.org/).
As with all Session chats, they communicate with apps solely through onion routing. Session Communities also include their own file hosting, contrary to direct messages and closed groups, where [centralized servers provided by the Session team](https://github.com/oxen-io/session-file-server) are responsible for storing the encrypted attachments. Contrary to DMs and groups and owing to their unlimited user capacity, the content in Communities is not end-to-end encrypted, which should come as no surprise. Session Communities represent part of the same trend as [Discord servers](https://discord.com/) or [Matrix chatrooms](https://matrix.org/).
The user can join a small selection of official Communities from the Session apps. If the user wishes to join any third-party Communities, they have to copy-paste a join URL into a textbox and press the "Join" button. At time of writing, there are around 120 known Communities.
