We need better community building tools and apps. Right now someone’s Nostr community is their followers - however the most enthusiastic followers want to be part of a core group.

Today they have patreon, telegram, discord, YouTube subscriptions, etc - all off shoots of more personal communities, more intimate discussions and often a safer place to share. Some paid groups and some open membership. It’s the difference between “follow me on” Twitter, and “join our” discord/telegram/whatever.

It could be a private white label relays service, or a multi-channel group workspace. A mix of posts and chat. Ideally content can be persisted without worry. Likely some moderation options.

Basically empower communities builders and members to come together on a Nostr foundational network. Network effects will bring the next 10 million to Nostr.

PS. I realise this is more of a concept that a specific idea - however getting there can take many paths.

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

Any more specifics?

I’d start with a white label relay-as-a-service provider, where it’s targeted toward an individual or business relay where only they can publish, or alternatively with a community join mechanism, which grants access to either read, publish or both.

We’re lacking the client UI to select which relays to post to today, so perhaps the relay can have publish rules/filters to only accept events being posted in relation to existing channels - similar to discord, slack or teams. We’re also lacking client channel support.

You can moderate as much as you like. Delete events from the relay (abuse, time based, spam, etc), block users, promote moderators, etc. you can review all reports. You can charge to publish events (likely just as a spam deterrent) or even a regular membership fee. Basically a relay administration portal.

The client app UX would be intended to only show data from that single relay (at a time) - which prevents external events (like those from outside the community) from showing to users. Obviously users can opt to see those events too if desired.

Ultimately we need more relays that are topic, purpose, or community focused - and we need to make starting a new relay as easy as possible - all while avoiding wider network censorship or decentralised moderation. We need a way to, not only follow someone, but also follow topics or join communities - or risk Nostr staying an event stream.

So basically, a website?

Well, in terms of being an operator of a relay, it’s hard to manage via the command line and SQL queries. If you’re offering white label relay services, your customers likely need some admin tools and/or APIs to help them perform common tasks. They are unlikely to have developer or sysop skills.

In terms of the community users, ideally it’s just an in app view most Nostr clients can support without much effort. Most already allow limiting which relay data you are seeing at present, and mixing relays. To be more like discord/telegram/subreddit/etc, there needs to be some kind of channel or topic dividers. Otherwise it’s just an event stream. I feel that communities often need some structure to function best.