Bots

On a centralised platform, a bot registers with the platform, receives a token, and gets whatever capabilities the platform chooses to expose.

Concord has no platform to register with. A bot has its own key, joins through an invite like anyone else, and reads and writes in the channels it has keys for.

What that changes

A bot’s permissions are a role. Grant it a role and it can act with that role’s rank. Every client checks its actions against the same roster as everyone else’s, so it can’t exceed that rank, and its actions are signed and show up in the audit log.

A bot is trusted like a member. It has real keys. A bot in a private channel can read that channel, and a compromised bot leaks whatever a compromised member would. Use private channels to limit what it can see.

Removing a bot means rotating keys. Stripping its role takes away its authority, but it can keep reading until a rekey or refounding cuts it off, the same as for a person. See removal and rotation.

There is no API to lose. Nobody can deprecate, rate-limit, or revoke your bot’s access. Nobody maintains compatibility for you either; the frozen derivations in the specification are what stays stable.

Getting started

concord-bots is a Rust bot template on vector_sdk. You write the command handlers, and it runs the connection, routing, and scheduling. price-bot is a small working example of the SDK’s command handling.

Every published bot and bridge is listed on the clients page.

Practical notes

Key storage. A bot’s key is both its identity and its membership. If you lose it, the bot has to be invited again. If it leaks, the community has to rotate.

Remote signing. Rekey blob locators derive from public keys only, and rekey blobs and the staff key handoff are encrypted under a pairwise conversation key either side can compute. A bot using a remote signer (a bunker) can find and open its material with one decrypt, without exposing its private key.

Rotations. Precompute the next rekey address and subscribe to it. Otherwise the bot will stop receiving messages the first time someone is banned, with no error. A missing chunk does not mean the bot was removed; only a complete set of chunks without its locator does.

Rate limits. Anyone with a channel’s key can post to it, so the protocol can’t stop a bot from flooding. Moderators can, by banning it.