Thinking through groups on nostr for communities that put a premium on privacy, and I'm not sure it's going to work.

You can get privacy of communication via relay authentication or encryption. But a starting point for identifying each other is to publish a public profile, which might not be desirable. And you might want to use your real name in a community, but not in public.

I'm just imagining asking a little old lady in my church (assuming she can get past the cryptographic key pair step) to permanently publish her name and picture to 8 billion people on the internet in order for her to get access to announcements about after-church potlucks. It just doesn't make any sense.

Having a single profile for your online identity violates the "selective revelation of self" principle. Even if you use different keys for different things, you ideally are only going to want to share your profile with certain people.

A possible solution to this is encryption-by-default. Only send your profile to the people and communities you want to reveal yourself to, AKA the Google+ circles model.

Have I been barking up the wrong tree this whole time? I know some people have said "nostr is for public data". I still don't completely believe this, but it's harder to work against the grain than I expected.