About

Why Singi Labs exists

The tools that hold our identity, work, and reputation shouldn't be owned by the companies we rent them from.

The web that taught us to write, share, and find each other in the 1990s and early 2000s has been paved over. A handful of platforms decide what we see, who we can talk to, and what happens to the things we make. LinkedIn collects our careers and connections, only to rent them back to us. Slack holds our conversations hostage to a price list. Reddit privatised a thousand volunteer communities. And now AI-generated content is filling whatever cracks were left.

Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon wrote a piece in 2024 called We Need To Rewild The Internet. The argument: restore diversity and complexity to a system that has been simplified into a monoculture, the same way ecologists rewild a damaged forest. That framing matches what I'm trying to do here. I'm not nostalgic for 1999. I just think the open web isn't finished, and the way back to it looks less like one big platform and more like a lot of small, well-designed pieces that can work together.

The AT Protocol enables this, and at Singi Labs I build some of those pieces.

The story

I (Guido) have been a community builder for 20+ years (Dutchento, Meet Magento, the Spryker B2B network, the CRO.CAFE podcast) and started building Barazo in February 2026 for two reasons: 1) general frustration with most off-the-shelf community platforms, and 2) a fascination with what the AT Protocol could mean for the future of the open web. So I just started building. No plan beyond that.

Once Barazo had an MVP, I started thinking about a related challenge: identities and reputation across communities. AT Protocol lets you sign in to any compatible app with one account, which means a person's reputation and history can travel with them between the communities they're part of. Super useful, for both community members and admins. And once you start thinking about reputation across forums, you end up thinking about professional identity more broadly: your job, resumes, references, verified work history, the things LinkedIn still owns by default. That became Sifa.

Singi Labs is just the umbrella I develop these atproto products under.

What I believe

Four things, in plain terms:

• Decentralize power. No single entity should control the network.
• Users own their stuff. Your data, your posts, your professional history. Yours, portable, leaveable.
• Build in the open. Open protocol, open code, public roadmap, audit-able trust.
• Earn trust, don't demand it. Prove the product works for you. No lock-in, no dark patterns, no "you'll regret leaving."

The products

• Barazo is self-hosted community forums you actually control, with cross-server identity so members aren't trapped on any one server.
• Sifa is a professional identity and trust layer: one profile that travels with you across apps, endorsements you can verify, a resume that isn't held hostage by a single company.

Who I am

Singi Labs is just me, Guido, in The Netherlands.

Guido X Jansen

Community builder with 25+ years experience growing ecosystems around open source platforms. Founded Dutchento / Meet Magento (600+ annual attendees), created the CRO.CAFE podcast (200+ episodes in four languages), and led Spryker's B2B enterprise community (130+ clients). Cognitive psychology background that informs how I think about participation, trust, and onboarding for the open social web. Long-time advocate for open source, privacy, and data sovereignty, running self-hosted, EU-first infrastructure. On Bluesky as @gui.do.

Where I fit

I'm not the only one working on this. Singi Labs sits inside a much bigger community of builders and thinkers, and a lot of the ideas behind what I do came from elsewhere. Some of my direct influences and contributors:

• Bluesky PBC and the broader AT Protocol ecosystem. Without the protocol, none of this works.
• Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon for the rewilding metaphor that ties this whole movement together, and Robin again for Funding The Web, the clearest analysis I've seen of who pays for and governs web infrastructure.
• Erlend Sogge Heggen and muni.town for "data defragmentation", a precise word for what Sifa does.
• Emelia Smith for generous advice on several backend and lexicon foundational choices.
• Ben Werdmuller for hard-won lessons on funding public-interest projects.
• Jeff Atwood and the Discourse team for "Flat by Design" and a lot of what I know works (and doesn't) in forum design.
• Elinor Ostrom, James C. Scott, and Jane Jacobs for foundational thinking on commons, complex systems, and what makes places resilient.
• My fellow Atmosphere builders at Frontpage, Smoke Signal, Leaflet.pub, the atstore.fyi app marketplace, and many others. We're growing this neighbourhood together.

Get in touch

The fastest way to stay in the loop is to follow me on Bluesky: @singi.dev.

All my code lives on GitHub. The roadmap is public. If you want to contribute, sponsor, or just say hi, a Bluesky DM is the most reliable channel.