It's done. Like, not all done done, but done enough that we feel comfortable opening the doors once more to the general public. Come on in to our roomy.space!
First and foremost we want to welcome the Atmosphere Community.
Roomy is made for all netizens, but seeing as we've been building this thing for the past year and a half in the company of fellow atproto enthusiasts, the majority of people we expect to reach with this first-look announcement will be atmosphere-savvy folks, so this one's for you lot.
Becoming atproto-native
Roomy has always been atproto-first by deferring to the atmosphere for user identites. It's taken us a lot longer to be truly atproto-native, as the necessary building blocks of the protocol just weren't ready.
In the last few months, following the stabilization of permissioned data, we invested considerable efforts into shaping those missing building blocks. This culminated in a proposed standard for groups management called The Arbiter, building on top of the perimissioned data proposal.
It was frankly nerve-wrecking to go from a soft-release at the AtmosphereConf only to revert once more to the drawing board in relative stealth-mode to figure this thing out. By now we've undoubtedly acquired a reputation as 'the crew that can't quite ship', and it's been tearing at us.
Therefore it's all the more gratifying to see the arbiter being recognized as the common protocol primitive we intended it to be.
I want to highlight the work that @zicklag.dev & the folks at Roomy are doing on The Arbiter. For anyone not following that project, the arbiter is a general-purpose interoperable group-management service that sits on top of permissioned spaces. The arbiter hosts community DIDs and their spaces and exposes a standard API for creating spaces and managing those spaces, membership, and member roles.
All this time we've been tunneling our way through the mountain in deafening darkness, blindly trusting our calculations would lead us to our intended destination on the other end.
Now, with permissioned data settling into a formal specification along with our arbiter concept finding approval among our protocol-drafting peers, we've actually traveled around to the far side of the mountain to see the other end of the tunnel being dug, and we can finally say with certainty that we've been digging in the right direction.
The math was sound; there will be warming light and breathable air at the end of the tunnel.
Stabilizing the client
Coinciding with the arbiter work, @meri.garden has been readying the Roomy app for eventually-on-protocol private spaces and a 'thin client' interface based on AppView + XRPC, essentially making Roomy just another atmosphere client.
My @roomy.space roadmap for next few weeks: 1. Private spaces + invites 2. Permissioned channels + roles 3. Big refactor to AppView + XRPC interface / thin client 4. Push notifications all parallel to @zicklag.dev speccing and implementing an ‘arbiter’ RBAC service for ATProto permissioned spaces
We'll spare the technical details here, but the crux of it is that our old frontend architecture was doing a lot in the name of a local-first/p2p vision of the app we then felt was necessary to provide the kind of data-control guarantees we want to give to users and communities. Knowing we will get to do that with permissioned data freed us up to make a dramatically more conventional app. Simplifying our stack with more atproto-alignment means we can optimise harder, ship features and fix bugs a lot faster.
Inhabited space
There's also been a considerable change in our app's UI, namely the disappearance of the ever-present vertical space-switcher menu popularized by Slack & Discord. Instead we've opted for a design more akin to Notion and other such workspace apps that optimize for spaciousness over rapid context-switching.
The vertical slider will be brought back as an opt-in feature for the fleet-footed, but we want the default experience of Roomy to center whichever space you're presently inhabiting, void of any nagging reminders that there's anywhere else you ought to be. Moving your attention from one context to the next should be intentional rather than habitual.
Open for business & taking a break
Immediately following the re-re-re-release of our app, tomorrow we will announce the first piece of our commercial offering for businesses.
Not long after this series of releases we intend to take a little break, NPMX style.
If you want to sign up preemptively as a beta tester of our Pro plan, use the form embedded below.
Companion posts
We’re back with more news tomorrow, but in the meantime please enjoy these accompanying announcement posts from our dear collaborators &