Colibri – chat platform built on the AT Protocol for communities big and small (colibri.social)

Hi, person behind the project here, thanks for the cross-post!

This looks neat, but should I be concerned about the permissions this is requesting for my account? Bluesky: Manage your profile, posts, likes and follows

Interesting project, but...

> BUILT ON OPEN STANDARDS. PRIVATE WHEN NEEDED.

> Running a private group chat? As soon as the AT protocol supports private data, we'll work on implementing it and giving you the option to create private communities.

Not exactly "private when needed" then, is it? It's disingenuous to even mention this in the marketing copy.

Please consider adding screenshots of the UI that provide an idea of what the experience will be like without having to log in using Bluesky or other credentials.

“Your data isn’t trapped on our servers” - where is it then? Who can access it?

“Open social” is so much bs compressed in a couple of buzzwords.

Thanks for building this, UX is nice and should encourage people to switch from Discord. Bsky only is a bit disappointing as it is still heavily centralized. I would love to see a system like this that can also set up channels over Nostr and the Fediverse. Fragmentation is starting to become an issue with decentralized and federated social.

Where is data stored? Bluesky? My PDS? Your PDS, for free?

Users in a Discord server/local community on tools like Discord naturally expect that their actions within that community are private in so far as they trust everyone in the community (including the operator) to keep it so.

By using ATProto, Colibri fundamentally makes all of your communication within any community completely public to everyone on the internet.

That’s fine for something like Twitter, where the product sets the expectation of such a thing. You can imagine how big of an issue this is when you try to do it in a trusted community model. Add on that Discord is used by kids who likely don’t know this and you can see why this is dangerous.

I consider this not only just a liability but bordering negligence. It is fundamentally broken, at an architectural level

It's impossible to consider ATproto apps usable until the horrific oauth situation is fixed. It's still not possible to adjust oauth permissions to something restrictive dynamically so every app needs a new account which kind of defeats many of the interop promises, if apps even allow it (colibri requires invite code)

I totally understand that words and ideas get reused. But when I see Colibri, I think rest stop on the freeway (autoestrada) here in Portugal!

Is there something like this on top of nostr too? I'd much rather see nostr because it's truly open.

So does it have the same hermetically sealed qualities that other atproto implementations have (BlueSky)?

Is there anything like this but more of a reddit style layout?

I'm on a Facebook group and we're actively trying to get off of all Meta platforms, and wanted to see whether I could start up my own platform using an open source platform - but I think something like Reddit would be more suitable as opposed to a massive chat UI.

[flagged]

> This implementation is almost entirely vibe-coded for the purpose of being able to quickly get started with development of the main application. It will be re-written in the near future to take advantage of Tap and be reworked to include all user data storage as well as any OAuth capabilities, which currently reside within the website's backend. If you are interested in helping with this, start a discussion on this repo!

https://github.com/colibri-social/appview/blob/main/README.m...

"For public private conversations" Go home guys

Cool, was thinking of building this myself. Glad you beat me too it. It's a nonstarter without E2EE for my use-cases, unfortunately.

We need more aggressive laws to prevent privacy destroying platforms. Every person who creates a website or platform that advertises any kind of private communication but does not fully encrypt user data must go to jail. This cancer needs to be stopped.

Not sure who the target audience for this is?

ActivityPub (Mastodon etc) has already very granular permissions wrt. who to federate with, which posts to make public, edit or withdraw posts after initial creation, etc. catering to EU privacy and moral/personality rights demands.

For closed group chat, there are many alternatives.

Discord is after all a video chat app designed to be used during a gaming session first and foremost.

Use AS2.

Use AS2.

Use AS2.

Making decentralized social media?

Use AS2.

This is not chat, it’s social media with a chat UI.

You should use AS2.

AT is a joke invented by nontechnical people. They had 1 good idea (updatedAt and use of At) everything else was not good for decentralization.

AS2 is perfect for feeds of content especially when you want to nest other content e.g. a user posted a reply to a comment on a game.

AT is centralized social media with cancer, stop using it.

Discord's main problem for me is that it's built around people having one and only one user, which is a huge privacy and pseudonymity mess. The only alternative that works somewhat is using the PTB version of Discord for your "alts".

If this project has genuinely decent multi-user support instead of the miserable experience of Discord, I'd emphasize and promote that first over being a Discord-like, since this genuinely improves on some of the privacy issues of Discord, despite AT Proto being public.

Better to distinguish the product from Discord rather than promoting how similar it is. Because of the public architecture, it's more similar to a forum board than Discord anyway, so you could also just as well give people another interface by showing the community as a conventional website. People may or may not like it, but it's basically what it practically is.

One of the big issues with Discord is that it takes public knowledge like wikis and makes it private instead - and beholden to the whims of mercurial mods and admins. Information being public doesn't have to be a bad thing that way.

Instead of Discord, you can give the people Discourse. :)

tl;dr: AT Proto being "open" can look like a bad thing in nominally private spaces like Discord, so promoting as something more open like an open forum board rather than a closed Discord server might be more interesting and persuasive. But I'm also a forum board evangelist.