# Colibri

20 Hacker News commenters recommended Colibri and 13 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 3 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Recommended for running large models from disk on modest hardware and as a Discord-like chat with nice UX; critics say its privacy falls short of its marketing and that local inference is very slow.

## Why people recommend it

- Streams model weights from disk (2 comments): "Already is possible. On a machine with 32GB ram, and NO gpu. Just need a large SSD or NVME. Streams from disk to memory." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48987010)) "There are more focused frameworks like DS4 and Colibri which have better support for streaming weights from disk" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49295989))
- Discord alternative with nice UX (2 comments): "UX is nice and should encourage people to switch from Discord" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47534381)) "Nice to see more Discord alternatives these days." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47534553))
- Promising and cool project (2 comments): "This project seems more of an experiment than something everyone should run, but pretty cool nonetheless" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48853395)) "This looks very promising!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47568552))

## What people warn about

- Messages not private or end-to-end encrypted (6 comments): "It's a nonstarter without E2EE for my use-cases, unfortunately." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47539404)) "By using ATProto, Colibri fundamentally makes all of your communication within any community completely public to everyone on the internet." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47534971)) "Colibri's marketing around ATProto creates an implied trust that doesn't actually exist at the privacy level." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47538849))
- Very slow token generation (4 comments): "It's a great concept but I think it would cross the line from 'very slow' to 'so slow it's unusable' at this size." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49066877)) "Note the performance stories - 0.07 token/s on a 24 GB laptop with 24 CPU threads!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48873369)) "they are doing similar things with bigger models, but tok/s is not high" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49101028))
- Privacy marketing overstates protection (3 comments): "I feel like Colibri (based on their page) just doesn't believe it's there problem, which seems... irresponsible." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47540140)) "Colibri's marketing around ATProto creates an implied trust that doesn't actually exist at the privacy level." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47538849)) "It's disingenuous to even mention this in the marketing copy." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47533862))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [llama.cpp](https://hackerapproved.com/p/llama-cpp.md): 471 recommend
- [Ollama](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ollama.md): 350 recommend
- [LM Studio](https://hackerapproved.com/p/lm-studio.md): 217 recommend
- [DS4 by antirez](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ds4.md): 109 recommend
- [Unsloth Studio](https://hackerapproved.com/p/unsloth.md): 94 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Colibri", https://hackerapproved.com/p/colibri/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).