Just wanted to point out that:
Relay = Server that lets certain profiles publish a selection of stuff and others read a selection of stuff.
That's a community.
Nostr makes these communities interoperable and monetizable.
This so freakin' awesome and literally a first in the internet's history.
You don't have to choose between niche community or public square anymore. You can publish in multiple niche communities at once, let the members come together in the reply section and still let the "public square" read all of it.
Also:
Communities, like chats, are so inceredibly easy to invite people to,
Communities are way harder to fake than profiles are,
Community is a group of people having everything in one place, not just chat,
Communities can have their own emoji's, prefered apps, GIF's, content templates, anything, ...
Communities is how you keep Nostr weird,
Communities can be forked and copied entirely (content, members and all...),
Communities is how I can see all of your content about Design and none of your content on Sushi,
Communities can span the full spectrum from private to Public,
Communities are jobs for Admins, paid jobs.
Community is what we got going for us.
Choosing to hide that away to resemble Twitter/Youtube/Instagram/... seems more and more silly to me.
Especially if you then have to solve a bunch of problems that Community Admins could have solved from the get-go (spam, curation, fairness, guidance for newbies, ....)
Lastly, Communities are just so much fun to design for 😍
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.
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