Send only and receive only directories - maybe I've misunderstood

I was hoping that I could have more than one system connected in ‘Send only’ mode to a ‘hub’ system such that both senders could write to the directory and the ‘hub’ would see both, but it doesn’t seem to work like this. Presumably I have misunderstood what it’s supposed to do.

What I have is a server system Q957 and two clients called homepi and odinpi. I have set up a syncthing shared directory on all three systems called .bak. I have set both homepi and odinpi to be ‘send only’ to .bak. They may be ‘send only’ but they overwrite the other system’s sub-directory in .bak. I have odinpi writing to .bak/odinpi and homepi writing to .bak/homepi but they’re mutually exclusive.

Is there no way to have a syncthing directory that multiple client systems can write to without ‘seeing’ or removing each others’ files? I can’t see any use for ‘send only’ if it doesn’t work like this.

I have also tried setting .bak on Q957 to ‘receive only’ but that didn’t seem to make any difference either.

“Send Only” means that Syncthing pushed local modifications (which includes new files, editions, and deletions) to other devices. “Receive Only” means that the local device receives modifications from remote devices but doesn’t send any local changes to them.

“Send Only” is useful if you want to be extra sure that no remote changes are pushed to the local device. You can also use it to override remote changes manually (with a button in the GUI).

On reading the documentation more carefully I think I can understand why what I am expecting to happen is wrong.

So, is there any way to do this? Maybe I can use .stignore to get what I want. E.g. on homepi in .stignore I put:-

!homepi/
*

I would probably have the two Pi devices using separate shares. It increases the storage required on your “hub” system but based on your use case I don’t think there are other drawbacks.