Relays as communities also aligns with team relays for companies and organizations and with relays for individuals. One person or many people you have a relay for your needs.
Discussion
Exactly!
Depending on the use case they might hold different content types, use different widgets or link out to different specialised apps/handlers, but they pretty much all need a chat (place to say GM) and forum posts (deep threads about specific topics/goals).
I'm involved in a few companies, a few communities, a "public square" (is that what Twitter calls itself?), plus friend groups, social groups, etc.
Each uses a system which might be Slack or WhatsApp or Discord or whatever. Each is siloed with no interop. And the platform cos want it that way because "vendor lock-in"
But as a user I want to access them all and I frequently want to pull ideas from one to the other. Or post to several. Each of these entities is limited by the silo of these systems in their own often invisible way.
Breaking down these walls with forums that are private and also interoperable-at-user-discretion is an awesome UVP.
For businesses specifically Relay groups make a ton of sense.
Those businesses either use something like Slack and have dozens of channels or something like Teams.
Both of these types of collab are just making up for the lack of interoperable Team Relays.
> interoperable-at-user-discretion
I like that ✍️
I've spent the day thinking about this and now I think relays != communities but that UX probably still solves this. I may only be slowly catching up here to things you've already thought through.
Where relays are physical servers, and
Where communities are groups of users
I can imagine situations of multiple communities within one relay (e.g. the user is a family member involved in many other small family groupings but does not need dedicated relay for each)
I can imagine situations of multiple relays for one community (e.g. the user is a large multinational company who wants high availability and hosts a relay in each of US-East and Asia geography)
Examples seem to break the 1:1 association and require NIP-28 (or 29?) as well. So then the question is of hierarchy and primacy in the UX.
What were you thinking?