Just deployed an update to list all the nostr communities that have been created over the last couple days.
Click the "Communities" tab.
It looks super cool!
Wait really? There should be a "New Community" button at the top right in the communities tab - if there isn't that's a bug.
NIP-94 is just metadata (including torrent infohash and magnet link)
I agree Nostr is not designed for files! You might be thinking of NIP-95
That's actually a really solid name
I think so too. NIP-94 was explicitly intended for this.
Resistance is a sign that the problem you're working on matters
> the alternative is not no curation; the alternative is decentralized curation
Exactly
Something you might not be aware of - if you create a nostr community it’s “namespaced” to your pubkey as the admin. So there’s no single “r/weed” that you can get banned from. There may be multiple versions of each community competing on the basis of which admin does the best job moderating, which is exactly analogous to the situation that already exists with relays and relay operators
No doubt - nostr is so multi-paradigm it’s hard to make generalizations about scalability. I’m the specific context of topic-focused aggregation, I do think increasing the granularity of moderation (i.e. not relying solely on relays) can contribute to scaling (horizontally in the sense that it makes public niche groups more viable)
That makes sense. I suppose clients will need to pull all recent posts tagged for that community in addition to the whitelist of trusted pubkeys and then filter the posts client-side, because for some of the larger communities the number of whitelisted pubkeys will exceed the max length of the authors filter.
Depends on the nature of the community for sure
That's super cool! I've been meaning to make Satellite a proper PWA
This is just the first super basic implementation though.
That’s a good point about the curator/moderator distinction.
I was planning to add an option allowing the admin to set the community as either “pre-moderated” (posts don’t appear in main feed unless approved) or “post moderated” (posts appear in main feed unless removed).
What do you think nostr:npub1gcxzte5zlkncx26j68ez60fzkvtkm9e0vrwdcvsjakxf9mu9qewqlfnj5z nostr:npub1alpha9l6f7kk08jxfdaxrpqqnd7vwcz6e6cvtattgexjhxr2vrcqk86dsn ?
So I have a totally different perspective on this. I do not believe that moderated communities on nostr are 'censorship'. On the contrary, I think that independently-governed spaces are (and will increasingly become) one of the most important tools we have in the fight *against* censorship.
I will explain how I came to that conclusion, but first let me try to steelman what I think you're saying.
Reddit has obviously been crippled by censorship. Like, it's is basically a psyop at this point. So I 100% agree with you that if nostr communities are implemented in the same way that reddit communities are implemented, nostr will, sooner or later, slide down the path of becoming censorious and irrelevant just like reddit.
So why do I think sub-communities on nostr will *not* lead to censorship?
It comes down to nostr's architecture. The fact is, all data on nostr is public and uncensorable by default because notes are signed and distributed redundantly across multiple relays. Therefore, on it's not possible for the mod of a nostr community to delete your post or ban you without everyone knowing. Unlike reddit, mod actions on nostr are 100% transparent, and mods are therefore accountable for the actions they take. Satellite's interface displays a *public modqueue* for every nostr community. Mods are replaceable because communities are forkable.
I'm sure you'd agree that it's necessary to delete spam, right? If there isn't some mechanism in place to delete spam, every feed in every community would be 100% ads. Right now we're all relying on relays to fight the spam battle, but that won't work forever. This leads me back to my point about why I think communities on nostr are actually a way to prevent censorship.
Censorship prevents communication. One way of preventing communication is by silencing people. Denying people the ability to speak. Signal *blocking*.
What's less obvious is that another way to censor people is by signal *jamming*. They way you do that is by increasing the noise. Imagine trying to be heard in a room of a thousand people all shouting at the top of their lungs.
It comes down to signal/noise ratio. Whether you reduce the signal or increase the noise, the result is the same.
Nostr already does a relatively good job defending against signal blocking, but we're still vulnerable to signal jamming in the form of unmitigated spam and potentially even AI-powered psyops. My viewpoint is that communities (transparently curated and moderated by humans) are how we scale nostr while making it *more* censorship-resistant.
I'm the developer of Satellite (I just pushed and update with these nostr communities yesterday). I want to avoid this being something that divides nostr. If you disagree with my reasoning I want to understand why. nostr:note1vgtuq6rpyy2ycru23gtj7qhaj2p7mlml29sd7zkyte2lphrfa4csz5favv
It's super cool. Looking forward to collaborating on this.
Soon, hopefully tomorrow!
There will be a directory of all the communities that people have created on the front page of Satellite
