Enjoyed reading this.

I too was pretty excited about the group chats way back when.  Until they immediately got filled with unstoppable spam.  This was an early factor in my decision to build relay curation tools.. I wanted to have a group chat for a project, and have it be useful.  Still we tend to use telegram and other chat apps because nostr is yet to completely solve this.  The first half of this is moderation capability and the final piece will be when auth is implemented for strfry.  This is the relay side.  Then we will still need a client to connect specifically to 'designated relays' of a group to join the chat..

Overall, I'm not surprised group chats didn't take off.  They got attacked and there was not a ready solution.  I hope stream chats can survive this same treatment, they're like a slightly modified group chat where the author can mute and apparently clients follow the mutelist somehow.  Designated relays could help this, but yes all is still being built as we speak..

I'm curious about the goals part you mentioned toward the end there.  You mentioned a relay implementation.  Curious what that means.  🌱