Colibri – chat platform built on the AT Protocol for communities big and small

todotask2 112 points 68 comments March 26, 2026
colibri.social · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (17 comments)

louisescher

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

sensen

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

imiric

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.

avtar

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.

isodev

“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.

iamnothere

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.

jonashus

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

rvrb

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

jFriedensreich

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)

schlu

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!

wolvoleo

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

cmxch

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

ebbi

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.

righthand

> 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...

swampdick

"For public private conversations" Go home guys

gavmor

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

BodyCulture

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.

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