After tons of work, a healthy dose of bikshedding, and a lot of ATProto alignment, we just pushed our next big update to roomy.space! We’re doing kind of a pre-release testing for people on the forum before we try to intentionally get more people trying it out.
We’ve noticed some browser compatibility issues, with things working best on Chrome, and maybe not being usable on Safari / iOS / Webkit browsers. Reliability around the loading and login is the next thing we are focusing on.
We also disabled a handful of the features temporarily while we get things nailed down.
Some of these will be re-enabled very soon after we fix up of the UI for them:
- Threads
- Using an ATProto handle as the space’s URL
And some of these will be added a little later after the release:
- Editable pages
- Proper unreads and hopefully soon after that an MVP for notifications
Highlights
This release is pretty major in a lot of important ways.
For one, we are deeply settling into this final architecture. We’re going to make it work, and we’re done rewriting the whole thing. I believe that the journey over the last year was fully necessary to learn the lessons that we needed to learn, but now we have to make it really work for real people.
The latest changes also align us much more heavily with ATProto-esque patterns. We’re using DIDs to identify spaces and provide credible exit under adversarial conditions, and we are using DAG-CBOR for encoding combined with valid Lexicons for all of Roomy’s events.
Deeper integration with ATProto apps and standard is something that we are keen on looking into as we continue development.
Gotchas
The app still needs some serious reliability improvements.
All of the experimenting this year has left us with little time to solidify the app and get it reliable, but that’s what we’re going to be working on next. @meri.garden has already started getting us setup with automated testing, and I’ve laid the foundation for telemetry and monitoring for the frontend and the server, which we are going to mature to help make tracking down bugs and issues more effective.
Right now data in the app shouldn’t be considered safe from data loss. We haven’t re-implemented S3 backups yet on the server, and if we make any schema changes before release we may not have automated migrations.
We’re really excited, and happy for feedback. Let us know if you run into problems, and we’ll be trying to get things all patched up!