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Comment by rvrb | Hacker News Reader

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

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I agree that is borderline negligence, and by far the biggest issue with AT and Bsky. Here is what I believe to be the most recent discussion on that topic:

https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/3363

Theres more recent updates on it in a blog post from Bluesky head of protocol: https://dholms.leaflet.pub/3mhj6bcqats2o

Very cool! Thanks for sharing that.

The current conversations are around how to do permissined data properly on atproto. I have a prototype, but Bluesky hasn't participated in the community effort and looks to be doing their own thing. They also took Bain Capital "funding" (private equity) which was the breaking point for me. They could have set up subs for nothing and made more than that, hard fumble imo.

Having something like circles from the Google+ days would be needed if ATProto is going to go anywhere. Is it possible in the protocol?

Yeah having the messages be e2ee by default and then extending it out to one or more groups depending in which circles are currently included for messages could let atproto act like an encrypted group chat with crisscrossing group chats per message, which can ratchet up and along with the new enceyption keys each message/batch of 10 messages/hour/day until that client is dropped from a group or a group is dropped from a conversation, then the keys change and pfs prevents old clients from continuing to read future messages.

Sure you can see that users emit messages in the pds but you dint know if its for your former group or other activitt

Fair point! A different user has already pointed out that this isn't disclosed enough on the landing page, and I'll be adding a section to clarify that, both on there and in the app itself.

I think one of the replies here already linked the current proposal for private data spaces, which I'm hoping will become implemented later this year. At that point, people will have the option of either having their community be 100% public, or confined to a more Discord-style data storage, where people can still join, but not everyone can "just read" the messages

Just want to chime in with, this does feel very slick, but this was the #1 question I had. I could not determine it from your site, and had to try it out to see.

One major criticism of things like Discord is that they're private, so I don't think that it's inherently disqualifying, some people might even prefer it for that reason. But it's very, very important that you're very clear about this, up front.

I really appreciate you chiming in, no matter how slick! New section has been added, lmk if you'd like to see this adjusted further

Much much better! Thank you!

The first assumption has been long disproved since multiple full scale Discord data leaks. If it's a public server, it can be scraped.

https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2024/04/billions-of-s...

any discord server that offers public invites is effectively public.

First, the user knows this when joining a public community.

Second, the moderators can choose to remove someone who has joined the community in bad faith.

Third, it is entirely different than broadcasting every single action taken by every single user in every single community on the entire protocol to anyone with one URL.

the moderators can choose to remove someone who has joined the community in bad faith

unless you prevent new members from reading the chat history until given permission then they can already read everything before they are kicked out, and they can come back with a different account.

you also can not detect people acting in bad faith if all they do is read.

basically, you can't expect privacy if you don't limit members to people you know and trust. that goes for any group chat, encrypted or not.

i also doubt that discord chatlogs are encrypted on their servers.

> the moderators can choose to remove someone who has joined the community in bad faith

This is one of the challenges of building a Discord alternative on atproto. Allow access or not, how moderation works, and having shared ownership that can change.

What is your point? I feel I made the one you are making before you even responded the first time.

That Discord communications can be exfiltrated in this specific set of circumstances (again, something I already said) does little to change that Colibri is implemented in the least privacy preserving way possible, short of publishing directly to every news and intelligence agency on your behalf, and does little to make that very clear in the first place.

you said: 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.

my point is: you don't get that in a public discord. and i believe that most discord servers, those for games anyways are public. only small team discord servers are private. privacy on discord is an illusion. i also would not trust discord to keep any messages private even from a private server.

you seem to imply that just by looking like discord colibri promises the same privacy options as discord. why? colibri does not present itself as a discord alternative. and although the line "privacy when needed" was misleading, in the FAQ they clarified that there is no private data. (to be sure i checked the site as it was 2 weeks ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20260311020805/https://colibri.s... )

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47541174 proves my point.

> First, the user knows this when joining a public community.

From Colibri: your community chats are public and visible to everyone by default.

So it's the same.

> Second, the moderators can choose to remove someone who has joined the community in bad faith.

Colibri has mod tools as well.

> Third, it is entirely different than broadcasting every single action taken by every single user in every single community on the entire protocol to anyone with one URL.

Sure, but then just don't use it?

It's really no that different from how IRC worked. Except persistent history is part of protocol and not some bots.

This is not public communities, not for small group of friends sharing edgy memes and discussing national security.

Private channels in public servers exist. I'm almost entirely on private servers.

This is one of the challenging aspects about defining permissioned spaces on atproto. In essence, you have a completely separate database per user (sits next to their repo) with which you can do permissioned public->private spectrum. Nesting more privacy inside another permissioned space requires breaking the typical permission walking chain, eg. in Google Docs, if you have access to a folder, you have access to the subfolders.

Yea, and it's a protocol problem more than anything. It would not be difficult to bolt on some kind of permissioning system to a PDS, but nothing else in the system would know how to handle that.

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