Yeah, I think communities have a completely different goal than social media feeds.
Social media is about "getting seen", "maximizing reach", "grandstanding". It is, by definition, inclusive. Try to get as big of an audience, as possible, and maintain their attention by feeding their excitement. Dopamine hits and yelling around and status conflicts and BIG REVEALS and follower counts.
Communities is about "meeting with the like-minded" and "finding people I want to converse with about X" and "seeking out deep convos and expert opinions". It is, by definition, exclusive. Try to raise the signal as high as possible, while lowering the noise as low as possible, by being selective in the membership. A community anyone can join is, by definition, not a community. It's a hashtag.
Co-locating a community on one relay is also the simplest way to curate community-related events. The community has a clubhouse, and the clubhouse has a library, a room to chat, a game-room, a calendar, etc.
The community can manually curate by labeling, querying, and colocating.
If you start from the domain and drive from there, you have to identify the domain a community encompasses.
A clubhouse. That's the domain. It's a place where the community members congregate.
I think we've naturally done that on SimpleX, Beave. Calling our various groups TheForest and TheLibrary.
They are virtual places, not mere messaging channels. And we are hosts of those places.
Thinking of the community as a group that controls or curates a varied set of events comes from @nielliesmons That bit of brilliance wasn't from me.
But I think the current encryption-focus, rather than location-focus, makes this concept unnecessarily complex and prone to error and leaks. I would like stop and weigh the pros and cons of each focus, as this is a subject near and dear to my heart.
Same conversation I want to have.
To the naive Niel in me, it just sounds silly to put all that effort and complexity into building the most badass secure vault, because you per se want to put it in the middle of Times Square.
A lot depends on your goal. For a group/community, is it about having a private conversation with a group of people that you know or is it about keeping the conversation on a subject, so your feed isn't full of subjects that don't interest you at the moment or at all. Limiting the subject matter would likely be done completely differently because you are happy for new people to join in the conversation. If you want only your desired group to talk, regardless of the subject, it would need to work much differently. If you needed it to be perfectly secure, then it gets way more complex.
It would be nice to have all 3 group/community levels
-- subject matter community (open to new members)
-- friend group (only invited members, but not necessarily needing encryption)
-- secure group (private and encrypted)
The secure group probably would require a private relay. The others could be public.
Yes!! You could even make some parts private (chat) and others open (library and articles). That would help you find new members.
You could even have multliple chat channels with different privacy levels. Like on Slack.
Communities (relays) are where the like minded meet.
Events (nostr events) are where Communities meet.
Yes, even if communities have separate relays, there is an inborn incentive to keep the events compatible with other communities and individual npubs.
I am also wondering if you aren't secretly fiddling away on a SupercommunityApp, that could be a client for multliple relays. 🤔
If I'm in the Republican Community and the Bible Study community, I might want to post something to both or move/share an event like a book between them. That is legit community-interaction.
Communities don't need to be like Fort Knox. They should be club houses. You can walk from one to the other, and take an interesting post with you.
You could always add encryption as an option, especially for a Private Chatroom, but they should have a use cases without it.
Oddbean new post about login | logout