So I'm hearing three different kinds of answers (maybe 4 but I don't understand the 4th one yet):
1) Use different identities for different topics/communities.
2) Use different relay sets for different topics/communities.
3) Apply topic tags to posts and let followers choose what tags they want to see.
Were there others that I missed?
How will option 2 work when notes get spread all over relays? Can notes and replies exist solely on a specific relay? Would it need to be a relay that has specific write/read permissions? Would a user’s profile show their full history of notes or would some be missing?
The idea of community hub relays initally seemed reasonable to me. But the more I think it through, the more I like the other two options. Managing relays for that purpose seems like a pain/nightmare and makes it really hard to follow things. I think if you want to keep topics very separate, use a different identity, and if you only want them separate in an advisory way, use topic tags. That's where I'm at right now anyways.
Mix of personal, public, and paid relays where the clients have smart ways of finding the notes you need by connecting/disconnecting.
I agree and I like this best because it keeps all the smarts in the clients and keeps the relays more agnostic.
So I think being able to browse "relay global" is a nice feature, and being able to direct posts to specific relays is a nice hack, but even while offering those features I don't think they are how to handle different topics. I'll then design the UX to handle topics the other two ways, and leave those other things as manual override features.
Our current approach is your #3 option. Will there be some published taxonomy of topics? Do you plan to just use #tags?
I don't know, but I wouldn't want people limited by the friction of adding a dynamic new topic to an official taxonomy. I suppose #tags makes sense. There may be NIPs with ideas on this. I'd prefer to follow someone else's lead. I like the general concept but I'm not really interested in the details of how, I just want to do it.
It’s an interesting puzzle to solve and one I’ve been thinking through as well. How a user can engage in different contexts and possibly different “personas” with the least amount of friction?
Who knows how this will all evolve and what it will evoke from users in the future. I just have a feeling that configuring separate sets of relays for each different type of content that you want to post is going to feel cumbersome for most users. It feels cumbersome to me and I'm a geek. I think 1 might be the simplest / easiest solution but it limits you in ways that some people probably wouldn't like. I would certainly do that for some purposes, but I probably also want to be able to post as "me" about various topics without being someone else.
I think even my idea (3) is going to feel cumbersome to a lot of people who just want to type into a box and hit send. But I also think if the UI is simple enough and there is some peer pressure from followers it could fly.
But I also think this whole topic really depends a lot on the vision you have of nostr as a network going forward. My preferred vision has a big, interoperable fabric where organic "communities" might evolve based on follow lists (and probably follow of follow, etc. lists), but there are no hard and fast silos as could be implied with more purpose-driven relays as in 2 and your original post that made me think about usenet.
