Nostr is not a community. It's a protocol. We are too small now that it looks like a community. But don't fool yourself. There is no community. There are just clients processing signed payloads
Discussion
Nostr is definitely also a community, at least based on the definition I cited in the post.
> a series of connections, and a knowledge base, and a skillset that we can't fulfill as an individual, while having a social relationship with people in such a way that we can call on them for help.
That's not to say that _everyone_ on nostr is part of the "nostr community". But there is definitely a cohesive social cluster with a significant level of shared values.
I think of it as:
The current nostr community as a whole: early adopters
Smaller overlapping communties. Comming from a network science background, communities are the clusters found after optimizing some metric such as distance between entities or entities that share some mutual label.
...Might be fun to see what clusters exist using the various interactions between users 🤔
💯 I've been waiting for someone to do this visualization forever! Maybe I should just bite the bullet and do it
Nostr is an ecosystem of communities.
Communities can exist at:
The protocol level (see: follow list)
The application level (see: Highlighter)
The relay level
or, the individual level.
What I see in this thread is a debate about the definitions of communities at the individual level.
However at the individual level, we are participants.
My npub is a participant of many communities, as well as an isolated community of its own.
My npub's community does not stop at the information stored on relays.
It extends into other dimensions with some applications, such as when I speak to users Nostr Nests or CornyChat.
It extends into "mental narrative" communities, otherwise known as "tribal models."
I elect to identify as a vegan. Hodlbod elects to identify as a Christian. These are examples of tribal models.
What I see lacking on Nostr to this day is communities. There is an ABUNDANCE of community to be found.
But what we haven't seemed to nail down is the individual creation and collective maintenance of our digital communities.
That is the goal here, I think.
Unfortunately this post ends early. Good luck Nostr devs. We're all rooting for you.
Though the definition of community is not clear, we absolutely are a community but it is a matter of what metric you maximize for community detection. Nostr users currently share the same house (or street block) even if some never interact because they are always in different rooms.
Our nostr universe exists mainly within 20 or so popular relays. At the two extremes you have n communities of size 1 or a single communtity of size n. Extremes are uninteresting so we want to encourage moving towards the space in between. (Hey, found a shared value 🙌)
In between we have communties that are representative of IRL groups, where groups are very small. You also have high mixing of clusters where individuals mix among many small friend networks (Marie, Sikto, Samecat, Dan for example) where they are one of the tighter nit groups but globally spread out .
The largest scale of interaction comes from the relays we choose to interact with. But its not hard to imagine similar relations and communities can exist at many scales (social network, power law relationship)
All just an argument to say that nostr is or contains communities any way you slice it.
Acknowledgeing the scales of social clustering should be a priority and having levers to filter our feed at various levels of resolution should also help the dynamic of users who are unaligned. They are on the same relays because thats whats available, not because they care about the other users. Tools like this could help multiple parties coexist on the same relays even if they will always go at each other. Everyone will diffuse and segregate into their own communities, the original will still exist, just in a more opaque fashion.