> Rally Help Center. Index of every page: https://rallywith.ai/help/llms.txt
> This chapter's pages: https://rallywith.ai/help/spaces-and-breakouts/llms.txt

# Channels, Breakouts and keeping things tidy

> Keep Threads in Channels, branch side conversations into Breakouts, decide who sees what, and find anything again.

Your first Thread is a joy. Your fifth is fine. Somewhere around your twentieth,
the sidebar starts to look like the drawer in the kitchen where the batteries,
the takeaway menus and a single mystery key all live together. Nothing is lost,
exactly. You cannot find any of it.

This chapter is about putting up shelves.

## Channels are the shelves

A **Channel** is a team's list of Threads: a client, a team, a product launch,
the office move. Every Thread starts in a Channel, from the message box at the
bottom of the Channel's screen, so every piece of work has a home and its results
have somewhere to go back to. Open a Channel and you see its Threads in one feed.
The rest of the Organization's work is still there, on other shelves, out of
your way.

Channels can also be private. A private Channel is seen only by its members, and
the Threads started in it begin private too. A Channel does not decide who reads
each Thread, though: every Thread keeps its own setting. Once that clicks, most
of this chapter is common sense.

Next to the shelves is your own short list. The **Threads** list in the sidebar
holds every Thread and Breakout you take part in, newest first, and the
**Activity** list tells you what happened while you were away.

If you used Rally in its early days, you knew Channels as **Projects** and then
**Spaces**. The Threads inside them used to be called Channels, which is the
sort of thing that happens when a product grows up in public.

## Breakouts are the margins

Conversations wander. Halfway through planning a launch, someone wonders whether
the pricing page needs rewriting, and suddenly the Thread is about the pricing
page. A **Breakout** is where that tangent goes instead. It is a side
conversation inside a Thread, private to you when it starts, with Rally already
briefed on everything said so far. Draft something rough, or bring in one
colleague to argue it through. The main conversation carries on undisturbed. You have
written in the margin instead of tearing a page out of the notebook.

Breakouts used to be called **Substreams**, a name that sounded like plumbing and
has been retired with full honours.

## And then finding things again

The chapter ends with search,
which looks through every message, link, artifact and file you are allowed to
read, and with links that drop a teammate into exactly the right Thread or
Breakout.

If you read only one page of this chapter carefully, make it
[Who can see what](https://rallywith.ai/help/spaces-and-breakouts/who-can-see-what.md). The rest is about tidiness. That one
is about privacy.