What a service is

A service is a boundary. Everything created in Lunar Paper belongs to exactly one, and that single fact explains most of what people find surprising.

Everything belongs to one service

A chart, a dashboard, a data source, an email template — each is created inside a service and stays there. There is no shared pool and no cross-service library.

So “I cannot find the thing I made yesterday” nearly always means you are in a different service, not that it is gone.

The practical consequence is that the boundary is worth drawing deliberately. One service per team, per product, or per client works. One service per project usually does not, because the same people end up maintaining the same connections in five places.

Membership is service-wide

You are a member of a service, not of a module. Somebody who can open the service can reach every module switched on in it.

There is no way to give a person Dashboards but not Emails within one service. If two groups of people should see different things, that is two services.

Access arrives one of two ways: as an individual member, or through a platform team linked to the service. Linking a team is the maintainable option, because leavers and joiners are handled once in the team rather than in every service they touched.

Publishing has a ceiling, not a default

This is the rule people misread most often.

Content Access sets the widest audience anything in the service may reach. It does not publish anything, and it does not set what individual items do. Each item chooses its own audience when it is published, and may be stricter than the ceiling.

So a service set to “anyone signed in” with nothing published is visible to nobody. And an item set to service members only stays that way regardless of how permissive the service is.

The ceiling exists so that one decision — made once, by whoever is accountable for the service — bounds every decision made later by everyone else.

External publishing is a separate switch, because publishing anonymously outside Lunar Paper is a different kind of risk from publishing to signed-in colleagues.

Modules are a per-service choice

Every module exists on the platform; each service decides which of them appear in its sidebar.

Turning one off hides it and nothing more. The content stays, and turning it back on restores it intact. That makes the module list a presentation decision rather than a destructive one, and worth curating — a sidebar of twenty modules for a team that uses four is a sidebar nobody reads.

The service knows what is in it

Because everything belongs to one service, the service can answer questions no individual module can.

The artifact map draws every connected item and the relationships between them. The Asset Library indexes everything the service has made.

Both are only possible because of the boundary. That is the payoff for the constraint.

Related

Control what gets published covers the ceiling in practice. Manage people and access covers membership.