Max DeMarco's avatar
Max DeMarco maxdemarco@primal.net 1 year ago
Radical community nostr client update: I love how multiple projects and developers have reached out regarding building a community-based Nostr client. There are a lot who agree with closing the whole nostr ecosystem from the people joining on this particular client. But I want to share some of my learnings and concerns to further the discussion. It seems that NIP-29 provides a way to create groups and build a community-based forum. However, a developer mentioned one caveat: it is built in a way to prioritize the Members. The arguing is that members invest in these communities, but the owner retains ownership, which, of course, makes sense for the owner. But NIP-29 groups are designed to be forkable, which is intended to solve this ownership issue. In theory, members can fork the group by copying content to their own relay. This is good for edge cases where the owner goes rogue, but I suspect there will be grifters who might copy a community just to steal it. I don’t fully understand the technical details. But from a creator's perspective, these owners have been building their communities for years, and people follow them for a reason. I think no creator would ever use a community platform if they couldn’t own it. It should be the equivalent of owning an email list. This client should enable a person to act as a multiplier, reaching thousands of people. This particular use case of nostr is aimed at creators, only indirect to his followers. Fans can opt out in various ways, but forking a community that a creator has been building for years is a non-starter for them. The need the power and own the community and can do with it what they want. If you truly enjoy an email newsletter, you trust the decisions the person makes, even though you have no control over what they do with it. If he fucks up go to another community - someone you trust more. Most creators have a good incentive and long term focus on their communities (fuck the people who dump shitcoiners and grifters) real creators care about their people following them.

Replies (12)

Leo Wandersleb's avatar
Leo Wandersleb leo@nostr.info 1 year ago
I'm not sure I'm following. So nip29 allows to fork a community? Does that mean you can "copy" a group chat under a new owner? And now if I'm not sure which of those communities will be around later, I post to both communities but people might be subscribed to only either of them? So they might reply to only one community? Other than that, I don't agree with your take to own the audience. I mean, nostr is an open protocol so if you want to build such a tool, by all means do but to decide on a fundamental level to have either the one or the other ... I don't agree with that. Let the owner pick and let the audience know how closed the community is. But in the end, each community member can already see and archive all community activity, so how to wall that garden I'm not sure.
1 replies ↓
Max DeMarco's avatar
Max DeMarco maxdemarco@primal.net 1 year ago
That’s how it was explained to me. I don’t understand the tech deep enough to answer the first point. Second point is that in any other tech they don’t truly own it. Nostr is able to do that. Only way to own a direct communication to your fans is via email. Everything else is a walled garden. So utilizing nostr for facilitating this is my point. That’s why I state it’s radically different than what the nostr ethos is about. But this would still only be accomplished by using this tech
1 replies ↓
Leo Wandersleb's avatar
Leo Wandersleb leo@nostr.info 1 year ago
So to keep members a confidential detail you would need to use gift wraps to send your newsletter to each of them and re-wrap their messages when broadcasting to all readers to keep the list private. Then people can copy the content but not the members unless those communicate their membership out of bands.
1 replies ↓
Viktor Vsk's avatar
Viktor Vsk me@saltivka.org 1 year ago
Nostr is built for “stealing” right now and its called censoeship resistance. Its a fundamental decision to not make it difficult to share content you see. Theoretically its impossible to stop information spreading on internet. However, standard platforms make it as difficult as possible, which effectively translates to creators thinking they control things. Not only nostr has nothing to handle this use case right now, I bet the majority of the community would not support it ans would say “if one is concerned their content to be copied to another relay they should not use nostr” Right now external tools should be used to achieve that - i.e. post nostr note with a link to media server which only renders images to whitelisted IPs (who paid for content)
hodlbod's avatar
hodlbod hodlbod@coracle.social 1 year ago
Yes, if censorship resistance is an anti-feature for a community organizer, they won't use nostr. That's ok, centralized use cases can use centralized solutions (although integrating nostr would still have benefits, if only for portable identity). This is a question I've been mulling over for a long time now. Nostr is really only useful for open and semi-permeable groups.
1 replies ↓
hodlbod's avatar
hodlbod hodlbod@coracle.social 1 year ago
You could make exclusive content work, either with encrypted groups or some other method of signature stripping, but you'd be cutting against the grain. Still, this is something I'm very interested in experimenting with on nostr.
VikiSecrets's avatar
VikiSecrets vikisecrets@nostrpurple.com 1 year ago
I think it's more a feature than a bug, no true ownership, no centralization, but I am not familiar with the details yet, will the copied group have a different organizer, are members notified when the group is forked, how easy is it to find the official/original group?
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