Zeu Capua: Message Gardening in the Atmosphere with Roomy Chat

Zeu Capua talks about Roomy Chat at ATmosphere Conference 2025 in Seattle

Hello.

Yay. It's so much scarier up here compared to live streaming. It's insane. Hello. Hi. Hello everyone. I'm Zeu, and today I'll be talking about message gardening in the Atmosphere and how digital communities can evolve past what we have now and how they might look in the future in the Atmosphere.

Before we talk about the future, let's talk a little bit about the past. What did digital communities look like back then, maybe 20 years ago? Usually, when I think about old digital communities, I think about traditional forums, message boards, BBSs where the structure is fairly rigid. Every community has a bunch of categories. Each post has to have a topic, and all of the replies in it have to be on topic as well. On top of that, users themselves are fragmented. They are different communities. Why would they be in the same space? Why would they be on the same website? But as a user, you are not necessarily only part of one community. You're part of many communities.

Away from these fragmented websites, we started going towards the idea of platforms, social media platforms. In particular, I want to highlight Reddit, where they took the idea of topic-based posts and communities and turned it into one mega platform where everyone is in a subreddit. Posts are still usually on topic, posted to a specific subreddit. But with social media platforms like Reddit, posts aren't just siloed within a single subreddit. You have r/all or the “what’s hot” front page where any post from any subreddit can be distributed to any user. That’s pretty good. Your post can have as many views as it needs, not just siloed within your peers.

But this comes with what I see as a downside. Posts are now not just for the people you intend to see them. For example, my post about video games is not just seen by players of that game, but also by political people or “normies.” My opinions are no longer just with my peers; they are being shown to other users. This creates a mental shift where posts now tend to try to be viral. They try to appeal to a larger audience. This degrades community building because posts aren’t for each other; they’re for everyone. That’s not great for actual connections.

Somebody said it’s probably a good idea not to focus on mega platforms. If we want to start building digital communities with real connections, we need to step away from having just one mode of communication.

Where do we go from Reddit, where you have this network effect but don’t want your posts to go everywhere? We shift towards something more like Discord. You have one account, you can join different Discords, but every message you send is siloed within your community. That’s good for community building.

There’s a shift here away from posts and instead towards chat, which lowers the barrier to participation. As a user, you can join a Discord, say hi, and just lurk to see conversations. But everything is ephemeral. Any knowledge or conversation eventually gets lost in the timeline. They’re in different channels and categories, but they get lost in the sauce.

Where do we go from here? Now, as a community, we’re building the next level of social media on App-Protocol. We could create a space where any thought can be in the correct medium, shown to as many or as few people as possible. We can inform this process with digital gardening.

Raise your hand if you’ve heard of digital gardening. About a third of you. I personally hadn’t heard of this term until late last year, but I really like the concept. For those who raised your hands, your first thought might be like me: really overcomplicated Obsidian or Notion setups with billions of notes in a graph, calendars, everything. But digital gardening isn’t about overcomplicated tools. It’s about developing ideas in a public space online.

I’m using a definition from Maggie Appleton. Gardens tend to be explorable: users can jump in and find the information they want. They’re slowly grown over time, not fixed to a single blog post.

Most digital gardening concepts focus on individuals. You have your own Obsidian or Notion setup or website. We can take these concepts and mold them to communities, especially something as big as building one in the Atmosphere.

What does the Atmosphere give us in terms of explorable gardens? A few things:

Domain ownership: the user only has one account and isn’t constrained by platforms or communities.

PDSs: give credible exit. Users can exclude their data whenever. You can leave a community or move your content elsewhere.

Lexicons: give shared data identity, letting information be shared more freely and structured between different platforms.

Some engineers are exploring even removing servers entirely. Instead of big relays or app views, users could talk to each other directly. Roomy would just query data and ensure the right connections. That’s what the future could look like.

In terms of the platform itself, how do we introduce these ideas? Should communities be chat-based like Discord or more like forums? Why not both? We have this idea of thought metamorphosis. Thoughts start in chat, evolve through conversation, topics change, participants change. We can capture those conversations in threads and eventually turn them into articles or wikis to share knowledge outside the community. The community focuses on chat and socializing in the moment, then builds intentional knowledge to share.

Here’s a quick demo of Roomy Chat. Roomy looks similar to Discord so new users are familiar with the interface. You have different channels and threads. Threads can originate from existing messages. You can move messages into threads, organize them as the digital garden grows, and make sure conversations are categorized correctly.

I have a lot of hope for digital communities built on App-Protocol, specifically for Roomy. Upcoming features focus on interoperability with other App-Protocol apps and the Roomy SDK, which is open source. You can adapt the UI to your needs, from a traditional forum to a command-line interface.

Join us at room.hat. Our community is in Roomy. Roomy is open source: GitHub Muntown/Roomy. There’s a QR code for Roomy Chat. Making Roomy happy is encouraged.

Shout out to my teammates Erland and Ziklag. Follow me everywhere at zeu.dev . Thank you for listening.