Humans are social creatures. We crave bonding and social connections. In our digital world, our common social space is a campfire, which is the group chat.
It starts out something like this:
That's roughly what it has looked like since the 90's.
Roomy uses a familiar structure because we believe group chat is the minimum-viable-everything of community building.
Chatting is like a pencil sketch; we express the first thought that comes to mind without dwelling on straightened lines.
Narrated by Jaydip Sanghani
In search of structure
The thing about group chat is that it wants conversation to keep moving. It's like a river, always flowing forward.
Structurally, old school forums just worked better for this reason. All of the relevant conversations were grouped together by topics listed orderly in index boards.
Each conversation on forums is contained under a topic. This seemingly simple design choice curates info really nicely.
Modern Discord is not meaningfully better at knowledge-management. For groups engaged in knowledge work, revisiting conversation is important.
Thought starts the chain which creates a flourishing foray of plantlife.
When larger spaces of discourse grow more complex, Roomy's UI opens up gradually, keeping everything orderly. We can simply create a thread and keep chatting.
A few existing community apps exist in this paradigm already. Where Roomy differs is in being an atmospheric web application.
Welcome to the Atmosphere
A better way to understand this is how Big Tech handles our data. All of our data is tighly coupled to the platform.
Now, imagine you stopped using your favorite microblogging platform and moved to a different one. It kept all your posts, pictures, and followers intact. That would be amazing, no?
That's exactly what you can do using Bluesky, an atproto alternative with 45 Million users.
Roomy aims to solve the problem that larger real-time communication platforms face: portable data that doesn't care about where you come from.
Roomy gives you a way to design your community while tinkering with apps you like from the ecosystem, providing the tools to build and cultivate your community.
Oh, and did we mention that you can use one account to use all of this?
