tinychat on atproto

I am currently exploring an idea for atproto based group chat platform. It’s called tinychat and it tackles a big problem.

Tons of collaboration and communication online happens in group chats these days. Most of these are private. Pretty much all of them hold on to people’s data and make it painfully difficult to access it from outside the castle walls.

Some chats should stay private but a lot of them would benefit from being public, accessible, indexable and usable by a larger community.

tinychat is an exploration of this big idea using open source tools and protocols.

This project is for open source developers, community builders willing to try something new. It’s in a very early stage so please be gentle and generous.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by to help test tinychat last weekend @liviopacifico.bsky.social @martinmueller.dev @erlend.sh @zicklag.katharos.group

There are just too many things to build - it’s exciting and intimidating. I want to ship a ton of new features that will make this usable for real communities within weeks or a month - threads and replies, rich editor with formatting, code, emojis and GIFs. Yes GIFs! How else do communicate?

However. I would also like to step back and restate the core ideas behind this project and realign the roadmap based on them. tiny is about radical transparency in communication and collaboration, protocol based operability and respect for the people using it.

In the spirit of openness, today I am adding public digests for chat servers. These are publicly visible and search engine indexable pages so that others can look for and find useful content that we as community produce

Next area of focus is taming bluesky’s firehose and correctly removing content that gets deleted by the people using the service. If you decide to delete your stuff for some reason, the app should comply and have all affordances in place to handle this correctly.

Finally, a lot of work will go into grooming app’s lexicon and sharing it with the community to both get feedback as well as collaborate on creating a foundation for more apps in this space. People should be able to build and host their own appviews for tinychat, adapting them to their needs

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