Why I'm excited about Roomy

First, let me actually tell you why I decided this would be my first post on Leaflet.

Choice

One of my favorite things about atproto is choice. I work for the @openhomefoundation.org - one of our foundational values is Choice, so it makes sense that I'd be drawn to something that allows me to make choices. I've chosen to store my Bluesky account on @transrights.northsky.social's PDS, and I've chosen to use @anisota.net as my webview instead of the Bluesky app. The flexibility of choice is seemingly endless with atproto.

And so, I chose @leaflet.pub as my atproto blogging platform to discuss why I am extremely excited about Roomy.

As I think about @roomy.space's official launch last week, I think about the choice I made a few months ago to dive in to what it was about. On a 9 hour flight home. Here's what drew me to it immediately:

Nested threads

Discoverability of conversations/channels

Discord bridge

Built on an open source protocol

Choice/chose(n)/choose are no longer real words, sorry for that.

Discord fucking sucks

For @home-assistant.io, @esphome.io, and @music-assistant.bsky.social, we use Discord as our main platform for collaboration. All 3 of these projects are open source. We build in the open. I'm pretty sure you, the reader, understand why I'm looking at alternatives, but for us it's a little more nuanced than the enshittification and age verification issues that most people have with the platform right now.

Threads are nearly impossible to discover if you aren't around in real time

Thread channels are hacked together versions of threads in text channels

Channel discovery is ass

You can't just spin up a channel for a project and archive it once you don't need it without it being in the long list of channels

People really dislike the threads functionality

Discord simply isn't the collaboration tool we need it to be.

But maybe Roomy is.

Nested threads

This one is an amusing requirement to me - for better organized conversations it's often a request made by Foundation employees. Nearly every new PM we hire comes to me, "Missy, how do we make threads in the threads in the #projects channel? Am I missing permissions?"

Nope, you can't do it. Sorry, it's a ~Discord limitation~.

Wild how something so trivial became so detrimental to how we want to work.

I discovered nested threads in Roomy by just fucking around and testing things, and immediately reported it to the devs because I thought it was a bug. I was very pleased when I was told it's intentional. There are, however, plans to change the way this functionality works - we've been in active talks about the nesting being set up as category > channel > subchannel > threads. Still speaks well to my own use case, but it's not quite built yet.

No other Discord alternative has this feature. Probably the best differentiator Roomy has over the other alternatives, imho.

Discoverability of conversations/channels

Our channel lists, particularly in the Home Assistant server, are unwieldy. We're trying to shove everything in and have it all publicly viewable, but it's becoming overwhelming. Not only that, Discord UI is so "intuitive" in that it hides channels from you! A new channel can easily be missed by even the most seasoned Discord users (as I was typing this post's draft, one of my colleagues said they spent 10 minutes looking for a channel that has been around for years).

In combination with nested threads, Roomy makes conversing easier and in a more tightly organized manner. You don't have to dig to find threads, the button is right there next to the chat button. Sure, you can click the thread button in Discord (only easily spotted on their desktop app or webview), but that's really it. Roomy has chat and threads right there next to each other for the same channel.

The Home Assistant community basically rioted after I removed chat channels for support (two years later and I still get complaints). This alone will improve the ability for people to get the support they're looking for in a chat style they prefer.

On top of that, the space's entire list of active channels and threads are in the Index of conversations at the top of the channel list. Easily find active channels in one click - one more click and you get the list of recently active threads. It's so simple yet improves the user experience vastly.

Discord bridge

One of the scariest things for us as we consider leaving Discord, specifically for Home Assistant, is losing the nearly 10 years of chat history in the server. We could do like Rust and make the server read-only for historical preservation and move on, but that still makes it hard to search and index. Not ideal, imo.

Unlike other Discord alternatives, the Roomy devs created a Discord Bridge. With this, not only would we not lose the history of conversations around Home Assistant but they become available to be indexed by search engines.

Which leads me to...

Built on an open source, decentralized protocol

One of the coolest things (and, tbh, biggest concerns) about Bluesky is that the posts are all public - search engines can index them, which means when you do a web search for a topic Bluesky posts can appear.

A lot of the conversations in our servers are support related, but because Discord doesn't allow things to be indexed in this manner, all of that knowledge is locked within the platform. Even though there are ways to make private channels in Roomy, its biggest draw for me is the ability to make public channels which would allow for search engines to index the conversations. This means that we can bridge our Discord conversations over, set the server to read-only, and then allow those conversations to be indexed along with future ones.

Plus, if you have a Bluesky account (or any atproto account), you don't have to create yet another account for another website. And if Roomy is your first atproto account, you can take it to any other protocol platform you want!

It's not ready for the foundation's projects...yet

Even though I've been championing this project for a couple months internally, it's not in a position for us to jump from Discord just yet. I will absolutely gush about how useful I think it can be for us, but potential doesn't win over minds. Experience does.

Getting your hands on something is so much more valuable than listening to someone advocate for it. I plan on building a test server to invite some active community members and colleagues of mine to try things out with me.

It has a lot of things we like and desire in a chat platform: nested threads (soon to be subchannels + threads), ease of login (you can use your Bluesky account to sign in), not losing the history of conversations in Discord, and the ability to have both chat and threads within a single channel next to each other. Hopefully sometime soon I can say that Home Assistant, one of the largest open source projects, is leaving Discord and joining Roomy.

And maybe we will lead the way for other open source projects to follow.

Huge thanks to the devs and extended team

Shoutout to Meri, erlend, Zicklag, JD, Fish, and everyone else in the Roomy Discord server who has listened to my opinions about direction. I'm sincerely humbled that they've allowed me to join them on this journey, and specifically thanks to Fish for making sure I knew about this Discord alternative.

Here's what a couple of them wrote about Roomy:

roomy, open now - JD

Roomy & Designing for Communities - Fish