posted in Fediverse

Colibri chat system (Discord-like thing based on ATProto)

Still a bit alpha, but looks promising. Several features seem to be waiting for atproto implementation.

colibri.social/
ColibriChats where you truly own your data.Colibri is an open source chat platform built on the AT protocol for communities big and small.
Edited ⁨⁨Oct⁩ ⁨4⁩, ⁨2026⁩, ⁨07:34⁩⁩enPage

Replying to @⁨abc@suppo.fi⁩

I'm not a developer, so I don't know the actual effort involves, but it seems to me like making a new one is like reinventing the wheel. Matrix probably has solved many problems that this new things still has to run into.

What's an SDK? I looked it up but can't really understand the techno lingo on wikipedia. It's a "kit" (whatever that means) that allows developing a platform specific app? Matrix isn't another OS like Linux, so I'm confused.

Replying to @⁨atro_city@fedia.io⁩

github.com/matrix-org/matrix-rust-sdk

SDK is a library layer that hides the complexity of a thing inside an easier facade. It’s exactly the right thing to do when the thing is a complicated one, but it also hints towards … you know, the thing being complicated.

We haven’t quite figured out whether a chat network needs to be as complicated as Matrix is under the hood. Could be that it does: federation, E2EE and the overall design of Matrix (it being a log propagator instead of a more traditional message passing system) increase the technical challenge by a lot, but then again, none of the three are essential (although undeniably useful in certain cases) for a chat network.

Matrix Client-Server SDK for Rust. Contribute to matrix-org/matrix-rust-sdk development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHubGitHub - matrix-org/matrix-rust-sdk: Matrix Client-Server SDK for RustMatrix Client-Server SDK for Rust. Contribute to matrix-org/matrix-rust-sdk development by creating an account on GitHub.

Replying to @⁨abc@suppo.fi⁩

The hardest bit is encryption, you can get a basic app or bot running trivially from scratch if you don’t care about that. People successfully wrote matrix apps for years before the Rust SDK existed, and there are plenty of other bits of the matrix ecosystem that don’t use it (mautrix/Beeper is mostly written in go!). The Rust SDK is nice to use and give a bunch of bonus features on top, so that’s why it’s popular.

Replying to @⁨abc@suppo.fi⁩

HEY HEY HEY, don’t get me wrong now but I’m seeing dozens of Discord-like apps over the past year and can’t understand one thing about them, which is WE ALREADY HAVE THE CHAT PART SINCE FUCKING 1988, it’s called IRC, it’s lightweight, not bloated, works everywhere, extendible and still maintained.

Discord (and Slack) are proprietary IRC forks themselves and adds almost NOTHING to that equation.

It’s the voice/video call part that Discord solved an none of these forks attempting to tackle that part.

Replying to an earlier post

Colibri to my knowledge is basically doing public chats until private spaces are in a better spot then doing private spaces for private groups.

Roomy.space is another one of these who built their own private spaces on atproto and would be worth checking out.

Also Atproto isn't inherently a bad place for this since it can be a hybrid system of on or off protocol, or using their upcoming permissioned data spaces for private data.