Nostr Web Client

Relays are Communitues, by default.

Surfacing (and using!) them in that way is how you get to their #normielization.

To the people around me (of which 90% doesn't use or enjoy Twitter btw) I show this:

Then I tell them: "Every chat/group/community you see here **is** a Relay (server)"

They all get that part straight away and thus know what relays to choose for their outbox 👉 the communities they want to publish in

They also grasp pretty quickly that they can publish more than just chat messages in there: posts, articles, events, audio, repos, ...

And honestly they get pretty exited about this part specifically.

In my designs, every such publication, when opened, displays to what communities it was targeted (and accepted of course):

This helps with community discovery and with helping them understand that they can target their stuff to more than one public community at once.

Then, for the inbox-part it comes down to shilling the benefits of having a personal relay:

- a backup of all your stuff

- fast access and computation for you specifically

- having your own inbox that you can set a price or other conditions for

- publishing private things exclusively to a whitelisted set of npubs

- privacy in general

- etc...

One last thing that can help is not displaying relays as freaking geeky looking websites 😅. Relays need npubs, and the profile name that comes with it, if you ask me.

JeffG 1y ago

All NIP-29 based?

The screenshot confuses me a bit. Is it sort of a super app with DM/private groups, kind:1 short posts, long-form, etc. all bundled together and instead organized by relay/community?

I think I understand what you mean but I'm not convinced. This feels way more confusing to me rather than less confusing. We have very strong mental models right now around how specific apps do specific things. Not that it isn't possible to change that paradigm (and absolutely worthy of experimenting with other options) but it's going to be a hard one to break I think.

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Discussion

HoloKat 1y ago

If the goal is to promote relay as community the just make a familiar community app. I too can never figure out what’s going on in Niel’s screenshots. Feels like too much functionality in one place. There are plenty of highly successful community software options to look at to see how people use the available tools. Part of what stops nostr from blossoming is thinking too far outside the box - people just don’t know what to do with it.

Niel Liesmons 1y ago

What community software is worth looking at?

Niel Liesmons 1y ago

1. No, with NIP-29 the community isn't the relay.

2. Yes, organization by community > by content type. It's what people naturally do.

3. No, it's not a super app. It's an app that's super good at the conversations/notifications around content types, not at handling/creating those content types.

4. What I'm showing are the most complex screens, because I need productive feedback on those. If people just use Chat, it looks and feels mostly like people's mental model of a Chat app. Groups/people that want to integrate more content types, however, can.

JeffG 1y ago

NIP-29 is literally titled "Relay based groups". I get that your concept here is likely a superset. A community can exist across multiple relays and based on the relay the user is looking at, they'll see a different version of the community content.

We'll leave aside the challenges of building a client that doesn't make that really hard to understand as a user (e.g. you might see replies to original posts that you don't see, etc) as I think that's ultimately solvable.

How do you see private groups fitting in here? Is your concept focused on public content only?

I really like the ideas, it's definitely a bit of a different model that would have the chance of working really well as a reddit style app but some of the magic of the single feed type apps is that you're always discovering something new or seeing things that are outside (but maybe adjacent) to the areas that you've signaled interest in. Separating into communities closes that discovery pathway quite a lot.

Silberengel 1y ago

Who sees anything new in Kind 01 OP feeds? Most npubs only look at their lists, like "following" or "trending", and everyone follows and boosts the same few people.

Silberengel 1y ago

NIP-29 Just has that name because relays issue some of the events. There is no 1:1 relationship between relays and NIP-29 groups. It is n:n.