🐝 Question for the community: 🐝 What kind of events do you think it would be fun to enjoy publicly on Hivetalk?

Monetization Musings: #Zaps , V4V, and the Pay-to-Play Pivot. Sustainability is the bee’s knees, and 2025 was our lab for micro-strategies: - Zap Goals: Timed targets under 100,000 sats/month, embedded site-wide. Hit ‘em, or the server’s off—keeps us lean and accountable. - Donor Badges: Big zappers get flair. Early supporters, you’re the real MVPs and are awarded rare Nostr badges. - Educational Content: Knowledge drops to empower users—because informed bees build stronger hives. - Pay-to-Play (Planned for Q1 2026): Recording and live-streaming to external sites. Some Hivetalk users log 10+ hours daily (love y’all!), but the economics need to work. Observations from the #Nostr projects? Subscriptions are a hard sell, V4V’s hit-or-miss (audience engagement is key), and growth might slow in 2026. Enter “Pay to Play”—could it be the direct, engaging path to better outcomes? We’re experimenting, because value flows where engagement hums. Stay tuned for updates.

Hivetalk Mantra: Code Quality Comes First Thanks to awesome new #AI based tools we were able to rapidly accelerate our build cycles, experiment more and turn around our code releases faster, while building the project in our free time. A little over a year ago, churning out 100,000+ lines of code at this speed would have been unthinkable! We put a lot of work in grinding out the new version, making a lot of revisions and trial and error along the way. While velocity matters, shipping responsibly matters more. We invested heavily in DDoS relay hardening, and enforcing NIP-42 authentication on our relay, two critical infrastructure layers that matter but don’t show up as user facing visible work. We also tackled tech debt cleanup—the unsexy but essential work that prevents yesterday’s shortcuts from becoming tomorrow’s bottlenecks. Check out our progress in this beautiful Hivetalk Honey Build animation.

Community Buzz: Small Businesses and Very Busy Bees If there’s one word for our user base this past 2025, it’s *vibrant*. We’ve watched small businesses and solopreneurs turn HiveTalk into their secret weapon for zap-powered transactions and global reach. Take @npub1m7h20lqwnjd8snaf8alefep6xfkdeanlv74ce4my5p4drjed5l2qsq0yf8 , the English teacher zapping his way through lessons for Russian students—frictionless peer to peer lightning payments, no banks involved. Or @npub18ams6ewn5aj2n3wt2qawzglx9mr4nzksxhvrdc4gzrecw7n5tvjqctp424 , who hosted weekly “Shakespeare-vibe” coding sessions to demystify #AI tools for the community. These aren’t outliers; they’re the norm in our hive. Check out this talk from Nostr Valley about Nostr for Content Creators and see how Hivetalk plays a role!

Did you know? #asknostr Now when you create a permanent room on Honey Hivetalk, you can attach a calendar event (Kind 30313) to your room, and it will pop up seamlessly as an event scheduled on honey.hivetalk.org. But, there’s more - since #nostr is decentralized, these calendar events will show up across the ecosystem on other nostr clients, bridging the gap. This is much more than just “sharing a link on another website” - the cryptographically signed and verified event data is also replicated - who created it, when it was created, the event details, location, time and relays where the data is published. Here are two clients that replicate Honey calendar event data: plektos.app and nostrcal.com

The differences between Vanilla and Honey in a nutshell.

@Dave Nicholls what are your preferred Vanilla features that you would like to see on Honey? 🐝💜

Hivetalk users, we need your opinion / feedback. Do you prefer using Vanilla even though it's only the videoconferencing, it can't scale and has worse fidelity? Or do you prefer the posibility of scale that Honey offers and all the #nostr tools that are enabled? #asknostr

2025 was the year HiveTalk truly took flight. Remember our initial goal? What started as a scrappy prototype #Nostr + #Lightning video conferencing has now blossomed into a thriving hub for global connections. That vision evolved rapidly, into two versions: Vanilla Hivetalk and Honey Hivetalk. If you haven't already, be sure to check them out at

HiveTalk

HiveTalk — Video conferencing, reimagined

HiveTalk — Nostr-native, Lightning-powered video conferencing. Permanent rooms, scheduled events, and real-time zaps.

Use services that can't leak your data. We can't leak what we don't harvest 🤙🐝🙈

This is one of the reasons @npub1z0lcg9p2v5nzg5fycxq0k56ze6snp42clmrafzqpn5w6u74v5x9q708ldk is so much better than Jitsy or Zoom. View quoted note →

Ok, let's be honest. Who do you think deserves to be ZAPPED IN THE FACE? 👋⚡🐝

🐝 Happy Labor Day Hive! 🐝 Enjoying @Hivetalk ? 💜 Hivetalk is a labor of love that depends on your generiosity to keep bringing the best features to Video Calls. 🔁 REPOST so your Hive can learn about how we are reimagining Video Conferencing for the #nostr age!⚡

Hosting a video call? Use @npub1z0lcg9p2v5nzg5fycxq0k56ze6snp42clmrafzqpn5w6u74v5x9q708ldk , your swarm deserve better than those other silos.

Showing real love for your video host and friends is ZAPPING THEM IN THE FACE!

One of the most underrated perks of using @npub1z0lcg9p2v5nzg5fycxq0k56ze6snp42clmrafzqpn5w6u74v5x9q708ldk is that you can schedule all your #nostr notes from its POSTA NOTA section :)

Want to try @npub1z0lcg9p2v5nzg5fycxq0k56ze6snp42clmrafzqpn5w6u74v5x9q708ldk without creating permanent rooms? Be sure to create an ephemeral meeting in the landing page :) It's as easy as all those data collecting silos, but better!

HiveTalk

Hivetalk Honey Dashboard

HiveTalk Honey dashboard - Manage rooms, events, and connections

@npub1z0lcg9p2v5nzg5fycxq0k56ze6snp42clmrafzqpn5w6u74v5x9q708ldk takes the #nostr essence to the video call environment :) #sats will flow!

@npub1z0lcg9p2v5nzg5fycxq0k56ze6snp42clmrafzqpn5w6u74v5x9q708ldk can be as plug and play as you need it to be. Access it directly on any browser, desktop or mobile :)

@npub1z0lcg9p2v5nzg5fycxq0k56ze6snp42clmrafzqpn5w6u74v5x9q708ldk has no interest in your data