People seem to be excited about my new project, Flotilla. It's still very much a WIP (probably a month out from MVP), but since it's been discovered I figured I'd go ahead and introduce it.

https://image.nostr.build/b9842d89fdc786ad3e86d692c4b52adce47e1bdd9daaf7d39cbf4806ecb75bc2.png

My goal for Coracle has for a long time been to support local in-person communities by replicating Facebook's events, groups, and marketplace. I've come to realize a few things about this project:

- Facebook is not the gold standard. In fact, people hate Facebook.
- There are many kinds of groups, for many different use cases.
- Very small chat groups work for most use cases.
- For almost all other groups, good moderation is key.
- Decentralization for groups works differently from decentralization for microblogging. Microblogging use cases benefit from simultaneous use of multiple relays. Community group use cases (in contrast to reddit-style groups) benefit from a single relay per group.

This is just the barest summary of what I've learned. But it's all in line with my long-held intuition that relays are, and should be, special. To that end, I'm creating a new client built around the dumbest form of communities that can be created: relays as communities.

Lots of code and specs need to be written to make this work, and as with Coracle, it'll be possible to host your own flotilla instance that only talks to a single relay, as well as use flotilla on desktop and mobile as a PWA and APK.

See the dev preview at https://flotilla.coracle.social. If you're interested in contributing, I've created several issues on the repository that should be good for first-time contributors: https://github.com/coracle-social/flotilla/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3A%22good+first+issue%22