The problem with being able to edit
Imagine you receive a message from someone. You read it, act accordingly, and go about your day. An hour later, you go back to the conversation and the message says something else. It's not that they sent a new one — it's that they changed the one you had already read.
That's what many messaging apps allow. Editing messages after they've been sent. Deleting messages from the other person's history. Rewriting the conversation as if what was said was never said.
It might seem like a convenient feature. But it comes at a cost: it destroys trust in the shared history.
The chat as a shared record
In Solo2, the history of a conversation is a shared record between two people. What you see is exactly what the other person sees. Message by message. Word for word.
It's like a signed contract. Once signed, neither party can cross out a line and write something else. They can add a new clause — send a new message. They can destroy their copy — delete from their vault. But they cannot alter what is already written.
The rectification window
We all make mistakes. A typo, a message sent to the wrong person, an impulse you regret the next second. That's why Solo2 gives you a 60-second window after sending a message.
Within those 60 seconds, you can delete the message and it will disappear from both vaults — yours and your contact's. As if it had never been sent.
After 60 seconds, the message is part of the record. You can delete your copy if you want — your vault is yours and you do what you want with it. But your contact's copy remains intact. Because their vault is also theirs.
Two non-negotiable principles
First: the data in each vault is sacred. No one — not the other user, not the server, not us — can manipulate, modify, or access the data in a user's vault.
Second: the shared history is integral. The information seen on one side of the tunnel is identical to what is seen on the other side.
When these two principles conflict — for example, if a user deletes a message from their vault — the first prevails. Your vault is yours. But that doesn't give you the right to modify the other person's vault.
Why it matters
Trust in a private conversation is built on the certainty that what you see is exactly what was said. If the other person can rewrite the history, you are no longer having a conversation — you are seeing an edited version of what happened.
In Solo2, what's said is said. Not because we can't implement editing — we could. But because we choose not to. Because the integrity of your conversations is worth more than the convenience of being able to tweak them.