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Barazo: Forum software where your members already have a full profile

Built on the AT Protocol, the open protocol that powers Bluesky.

Barazo is open-source forum software built on the AT Protocol, the open network behind Bluesky. Members sign in with their existing Bluesky accounts, no registration forms on your forum. Their posts stay with their own accounts, not locked in your database. Barazo is available today for anyone with a Bluesky account. No Bluesky account yet? It takes two minutes, and that account works across every AT Protocol app.

What if your forum worked differently?

Imagine a forum where new members show up with a real profile, a post history, and connections you can actually see. Where you never have to build a registration system, manage passwords, or store identity data you'd rather not be responsible for. Where every post ever made is accessible to your community, with no artificial cutoff window.

That is what building on the AT Protocol makes possible. Members' posts live in their own accounts, not in your database. They can take them along if they leave. If your forum ever shuts down, their data doesn't disappear with it. And you, as the admin, get to focus on your community instead of your infrastructure.

Twenty years of community management taught me this

I've run communities on vBulletin, phpBB, Slack, Discord, Discourse, Facebook Groups. The pattern keeps repeating: you build something, onboard thousands of members, and then the platform changes the rules. Slack limits your history to 90 days. Facebook charges you to reach your own group. Every migration means your most respected members show up as "new user" and the community never fully recovers.

The problem was never the communities. It was that the tools forced you to choose between convenience and control. Barazo doesn't ask you to make that choice.

"Twenty years of building communities on other people's platforms. I finally built the one I always needed."
— Guido Jansen, founder

What works today

Barazo is in open alpha. Still in development, but the base features work and your members' content is safely stored in their own accounts.

Sign in with Bluesky. Create and browse discussion topics. Reply, vote, follow threads. Rich text editor with markdown and link previews. Categories and pinned topics. Full moderation suite: mod notes, warnings, distinguished comments, community rules, topic notices. Per-community profiles with sync from your AT Protocol account. Plugin system with an official moderation toolkit. Global aggregator to browse across communities. Self-host with Docker Compose. Everything open source (AGPL backend, MIT frontend).

Coming soon

Managed hosting (Q3 2026, get in touch if you're interested). Internationalization. Keyboard shortcuts. @mention autocomplete. RSS feeds. Webmentions. Admin dashboard redesign. WYSIWYG editor plugin. Webhook API for integrations. Community directory to discover other Barazo forums. Email/mailing list mode.

Part of Singi Labs

Barazo is one of two products from Singi Labs, built by Guido X Jansen in the Netherlands. Its sibling Sifa is a professional identity layer for the AT Protocol. As Barazo communities grow, your forum contributions will appear as verified activity on your Sifa professional profile. And Sifa's trust infrastructure (sybil detection, anti-abuse labels) feeds back into Barazo to help keep communities safe.

Open source (AGPL + MIT). Built on independent EU infrastructure. Self-host it anywhere.