Roomy: an Open, Forum-Style Discord Alternative Built on the AT Protocol Goes Public

The developers of Roomy have announced that their app is ready enough to reopen to the general public. Roomy is an open Discord alternative for the decentralized web, built not around private messaging but around public, forum-like community spaces. Identity and social connections are handled by the AT Protocol — the same protocol that powers Bluesky.

The road to being “native”

According to the team, Roomy was “atproto-first” from the start: it leaned on the “atmosphere” (the AT Protocol ecosystem) to manage user identities. But becoming truly “atproto-native” was far from immediate — the necessary primitives simply didn't exist in the protocol. Once the permissioned data mechanism had stabilized, the team turned to the missing pieces and proposed a standard for group management called The Arbiter.

Arbiter is described as a universal, interoperable group-management service that runs on top of permissioned spaces: it stores communities' DIDs and their spaces and provides a standard API for creating spaces and managing membership and member roles. The authors make no secret of the fact that they had earned a reputation as “the team that can never ship a product”: after an early showing at AtmosphereConf, they had to go back to the drawing board. All the more gratifying, then, that Arbiter was recognized by their peers as a shared protocol primitive — metaphorically speaking, the tunnel they had long been digging blind finally met the one coming the other way.

A more familiar app

In parallel, work went into stabilizing the client. The old architecture was tailored to a local-first/p2p approach for the sake of guaranteeing control over data. Once they realized that permissioned data offered the same guarantees, the developers were able to build a far more conventional app — which means optimizing it more aggressively, shipping features faster and fixing bugs sooner. The client is being moved to a “thin” model based on AppView and XRPC, effectively turning Roomy into just another app in the “atmosphere.”

The interface has changed noticeably too. The developers dropped the vertical space switcher familiar from Slack and Discord. Instead they chose a Notion-style approach, where the space you are currently in comes first, with no nagging reminders that there are things to do somewhere else. Switching context, as they see it, should be a deliberate act rather than a habitual, mechanical one. They promise to bring the vertical panel back as an option for those who value speed.

What's next

Following the release, the team plans to present the first part of a commercial offering for businesses, and then take a short break. Anyone interested is invited to sign up in advance as a beta tester for the paid Pro plan.

Source: Lobsters