Yeah I read your article on how you see communities on nostr and technically it makes sense, and I guess you could say posting to gated relays is participating in communities. To me a community feels more of a destination and an exclusive circle. It’s where “your people” hang out. Will relays give me the same feeling of being with “my people”? Hard to say, but my initial assessment is no. Just because I have access to some relays and can post from any nostr client, doesn’t necessarily mean I feel like I belong to something. I guess you could say the destination and your own spot on the web is an important aspect in my opinion. Maybe time proves this incorrect and people are happy to participate in gated relays and do see them as communities, but currently I do not. Or maybe good UX solves that with new kinds of clients - who knows. 

As you know, one of the critical aspects of design is creating familiar settings where people can quickly get a handle on how to use an application. One of my concerns with nostr is that we are introducing too many new types of experiences with unfamiliar UX - and that this may actually slow adoption. I get it, nostr is cool and unique and opens up all sorts of possibilities, but I think it’s important that we ground some of the new UX in the new and familiar. You do a lot of what I would call “cutting edge” design which pushes boundaries - and I like it, but I also wonder if people will “get it” quickly enough to take notice of what you’re actually offering in terms of a new and unique experience. Hopefully they do. 

I don’t have any counterarguments to any of your points on Communities, and I certainly don’t think we should hide them. I was waiting for for a working community client for a while to start my own but never found it. The tools were just not where they needed to be, and as far as I know they still aren’t. 

I’m not saying communities should resemble Twitter, but the fact is, most of our “social” clients look like Twitter replicas. People see Twitter, they expect Twitter behavior. Even with communites, people don’t think about servers. They join channels, groups, in some cases servers like Discord, but the “hosted” communities are simply website destinations. You load a website, you make a post. We can’t expect people to be able to manage multiple servers in the same interface at scale. Yeah, you could join them like discord servers and we have clients that are trying to do this now which is cool, but this UX is not part of our Twitter clones. You could add it, but I think it would just further confuse people than anything - going back to keeping UI familiar with expectations. If we want something new and unique, that’s fine too, we can create experiences that set the right expectations and not anchor them to Twitter clones.