I've been thinking about how Nostr could parallel some of the other functionality that is on the other social media platforms, and I had an idea. Facebook groups is a huge draw for people, as a place for like minded people to collect and share information just within that group. The groups can be public and open, public but closed, or private and closed.

Maybe the way to create something like this within Nostr is with virtual nodes. A service could enable the creation of these virtual nodes that people could add to their node list on a client. The clients would need to allow the users to hide the node from the public list of nodes that is visible to anyone who visits an npub profile, so that is a change that would need to be done at the client level.

For virtual nodes, new users would request permission to join, and the virtual node admin/moderator(s) would be able to grant access to the node to that profile. Notes meant only for members of that group would have metadata that could prevent other nodes from storing it, making that node the only place it could be found. A client given a membership key could see it, but it would not be visible to anyone not on that list. This would probably need to be some kind of encryption key.

I think groups are important, both public and private, if we want nostr to be anything other than just a global broadcast system where everyone can see everything. A private node between me and my doctor could share information to my family or his colleagues, but nobody else could see it. An Executive Committee or a court could keep deliberations confidential on a virtual node until a decision is reached, then the full discussion could be made public for transparency. I'm sure there are plenty of use cases that we would want to explore.

This is just a brainstorm idea. But I remember how fast Facebook filled up during the 2008 elections in the US, and if people could self-organize with virtual nodes that could be made public or private, I think we would see Nostr explode in population very quickly.