Roomy .space (alpha-4)
Today’s release post is presented by the lead dev of the alpha-4 cycle, @flo-bit.dev
We've just released our forth alpha version of Roomy. In this post I’ll talk about what’s new, how to migrate and what’s next on our roadmap.
New domain
While roomy.chat is a great domain, we’re aiming to be more than just a group chat, which our new domain hopefully reflects:
Introducing: roomy.space!
You should automatically get redirected when trying to visit legacy roomy.chat domain.
Backend switch (yet again)
As already teased in the last post, we switched our data syncing layer from our custom placeholder solution to the open source Jazz sync engine.
This enabled us to quickly add some pretty essential features:
- Encryption and access controls
In earlier versions, anyone could in theory do basically anything, for example edit someone else’s messages or clear the list of banned users in a space. Thanks to jazz’s built in access controls this should now be impossible (we haven’t extensively tested this yet, though). - Public access without logging in
While we could have enabled that earlier, for spam protection we didn’t allow anyone to view spaces before, without being signed in. Now you can actually view spaces without a user account and only interactions require you to sign in. - Better performance
We’ll do some extensive testing over the next weeks, but it already feels snappier, especially for channels with lots of messages.
Most importantly for us, we can now focus on new features and UI/UX improvements instead of having to spend lots of time fixing bugs in our placeholder backend.
The Jazz team knows we are huge fans of the Keyhive design and its unique affordances for building ‘sovereign communities’. Keyhive isn't ready for use yet and won’t be for some time still, so we will go as far as Jazz can possibly take us—which might be very far indeed if Jazz can provide those same affordances in its own way.
In parallel with our production-service being built with Jazz we will be contributing to and experimenting with Keyhive. On that note...
BeeKEM explained
Another fresh member of the team, Meri, has been studying Keyhive (among other cool things we will get into in following releases), starting at the distributed-encryption layer BeeKEM:
I’ve spent the last year working on local-first apps, most recently with Muni Town. For me, ‘local-first’ isn’t just a technical architecture — it’s a political and social stance. It’s about shifting control: from remote servers and top-down central authorities deciding how data, workflows, and communities operate, to individuals and communities reclaiming that control and gaining autonomy. Seen this way, privacy and consent aren’t add-ons — they’re foundational, just as critical as sync or data locality.
Ink & Switch’s Keyhive project is a capabilities-based system for CRDT authorisation and sync that opens up real possibilities for privacy-preserving local-first apps. Libraries like Automerge, Yjs, and Loro have already made it viable to build real-time collaborative apps without relying on a centralised authority to manage consistency. Yet in practice, we still lean on central servers for sync — with all the privacy implications that entails.
Other new features
While rewriting our backend, we also couldn’t resist to add one or two new features, the main two being:
- Unread markers for channels
- Notification markers for mentions and replies
We removed Custom Space Domains for now, but will soon re-introduce them using your Bluesky account, which will hopefully make this both easier (just a button click in the channel settings), faster (as you don’t have to wait for a DNS record to propagate) and useable without a custom domain (just use your Bluesky handle).
Migration
If you already had a space before, this is how you can migrate it to the new version:
- Go to the old version at alpha2.roomy.chat and export your space in the space settings, which will download a zip file
- Remove "alpha2." from the url address, click "import space", upload the zip file and wait until it finished importing, your channels, threads and messages should all be imported, but all members will have to join your space again.
Next on the roadmap
- UI redesign
- Cleaning up all the buttons, etc that cropped up
- Unify the design and make it easier to understand and use
- Space home page
- Discord import and bridge
- More direct Bluesky integration
- Integrated Bluesky Feeds
- Use your handle as a space name
- Integrate Bluesky DMs
- Improve Pages (better editing, smarter rendering)