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.<p>By using ATProto, Colibri fundamentally makes all of your communication within any community completely public to everyone on the internet.<p>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.<p>I consider this not only just a liability but bordering negligence. It is fundamentally broken, at an architectural level
I agree that is borderline negligence, and by far the biggest issue with AT and Bsky. Here is what I believe to be the most recent discussion on that topic:<p><a href="https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/3363" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/3363</a>
any discord server that offers public invites is effectively public.
First, the user knows this when joining a public community.<p>Second, the moderators can choose to remove someone who has joined the community in bad faith.<p>Third, it is entirely different than broadcasting every single action taken by every single user in every single community on the entire protocol to anyone with one URL.
<i>the moderators can choose to remove someone who has joined the community in bad faith</i><p>unless you prevent new members from reading the chat history until given permission then they can already read everything before they are kicked out, and they can come back with a different account.<p>you also can not detect people acting in bad faith if all they do is read.<p>basically, you can't expect privacy if you don't limit members to people you know and trust. that goes for any group chat, encrypted or not.<p>i also doubt that discord chatlogs are encrypted on their servers.
What is your point? I feel I made the one you are making before you even responded the first time.<p>That Discord communications can be exfiltrated in this specific set of circumstances (again, something I already said) does little to change that Colibri is implemented in the least privacy preserving way possible, short of publishing directly to every news and intelligence agency on your behalf, and does little to make that very clear in the first place.
you said: <i>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.</i><p>my point is: you don't get that in a public discord. and i believe that most discord servers, those for games anyways are public. only small team discord servers are private. privacy on discord is an illusion. i also would not trust discord to keep any messages private even from a private server.<p>you seem to imply that just by looking like discord colibri promises the same privacy options as discord. why? colibri does not present itself as a discord alternative. and although the line "privacy when needed" was misleading, in the FAQ they clarified that there is no private data. (to be sure i checked the site as it was 2 weeks ago: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20260311020805/https://colibri.social/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20260311020805/https://colibri.s...</a> )
Private channels in public servers exist. I'm almost entirely on private servers.
Fair point! A different user has already pointed out that this isn't disclosed enough on the landing page, and I'll be adding a section to clarify that, both on there and in the app itself.<p>I think one of the replies here already linked the current proposal for private data spaces, which I'm hoping will become implemented later this year. At that point, people will have the option of either having their community be 100% public, or confined to a more Discord-style data storage, where people can still join, but not everyone can "just read" the messages
Just want to chime in with, this does feel very slick, but this was the #1 question I had. I could not determine it from your site, and had to try it out to see.<p>One major criticism of things like Discord is that they're private, so I don't think that it's inherently disqualifying, some people might even prefer it for that reason. But it's very, very important that you're very clear about this, up front.
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.
Done! Thanks for the suggestion, that's a good idea.
Thanks for the quick fix :) Nice to see more Discord alternatives these days.<p>A few other landing page issues if you feel like addressing them:<p>- Attempting to navigate with the Tab key results in tab order following nav elements once, where focus indicators aren't visible, and then the same elements get iterated over again but this time focus indicators are visible.<p>- Tab order doesn't include screenshots and jumps to the FAQ<p>- Clicking a thumbnail shows the larger image but without any elements for closing the overlay<p>- Pressing Esc doesn't close the overlay<p>- No skip links on any of the pages
I assume it looks the same as literally every other chat app
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
Hi! We're doing that to allow you to update your profile from within the app. Not doing anything else besides that. If you have concerns, take a look at the source code:
<a href="https://github.com/colibri-social/colibri.social" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/colibri-social/colibri.social</a>
Very interesting project.<p>From a product uptake perspective, I could suggest that since a user is still building trust when they begin use - to only require as few permissions as needed. I'd punt that profile update requirement out personally for another method later.<p>An example might be when a user has used your app for N sessions, or after N months.
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)
Is there anything like this but more of a reddit style layout?<p>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.
Hi! We've got Forum-Style channels planned, similar to Discords, would that work for you? It'd still be a single text channel, and you could have multiple of them per community.
Is there something like this on top of nostr too? I'd much rather see nostr because it's truly open.
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!
Where is data stored? Bluesky? My PDS? Your PDS, for free?
Hi, I've just added an FAQ entry about this:
<a href="https://colibri.social/faq#where-is-my-data-stored" rel="nofollow">https://colibri.social/faq#where-is-my-data-stored</a><p>Also, feel free to DM me (@colibri.social) on Bluesky if you want to migrate to the Colibri PDS! We do host one ourselves.
“Your data isn’t trapped on our servers” - where is it then? Who can access it?<p>“Open social” is so much bs compressed in a couple of buzzwords.
> where is it then?<p>it might be on <a href="https://bsky.social" rel="nofollow">https://bsky.social</a>, <a href="https://npmx.dev/pds" rel="nofollow">https://npmx.dev/pds</a> or sitting next to your router in your living room in the form of a raspberry pi (<a href="https://atproto.com/guides/self-hosting" rel="nofollow">https://atproto.com/guides/self-hosting</a>)
Hi, person behind the project here, thanks for the cross-post!
So does it have the same hermetically sealed qualities that other atproto implementations have (BlueSky)?
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.
We've taken a look at co-supporting ActivityPub as well actually! And yeah, the fragmentation is an issue. But I honestly think we might see at lease some level of interop between these fragments in the coming years, even if it's just some parts of the protocols and specs going in the same direction.
Interesting project, but...<p>> BUILT ON OPEN STANDARDS. PRIVATE WHEN NEEDED.<p>> 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.<p>Not exactly "private when needed" then, is it? It's disingenuous to even mention this in the marketing copy.
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