An audience never appears on its own; it is always the audience of a grant, and a node's readers are the union of the audiences of the live grants that cover it, plus the owner and admins, plus whatever the node's access mode adds. Membership of group and readers audiences is late-bound: it is recomputed whenever the graph changes, so removing someone from a group or narrowing a document's readers takes effect everywhere at once. everyone is how content becomes public, and a space that has no everyone grant on its root is private by default. The word audience in HM24 named the server a short-lived authentication capability was addressed to; Stem uses it only in this sense.

Two hard-coded audiences exist: everyone (visibility empty, a blob_visibility row with space 0) and the owner-plus-root-writers of a space (visibility Private). Sharing with one outsider or by link cannot be said. The five kinds here are the generalisation the permissions investigation called "everything is a grant".