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This is my RADICAL approach to how I would build a community-first Nostr client: First of all: remove access to the entire ecosystem once a user logs in. (I know this sounds counterintuitive, but hear me out). This is a community-first approach. Once you're onboarded by a creator, you don't want random Bitcoin or footstr content on your timeline. You came to interact with the community. In the beginning, give users as little choice as possible when it comes to interacting with the protocol. All they see and feel is the core function of the client: COMMUNITY! They didn’t come to grow their own community or make new internet friends—they came for the artist, the YouTuber, or whoever it is they care about. So give them time to slowly get used to the new interface and focus on enjoying their first experience. How do we do that? From a product and UX perspective, this means thinking about how users interact with the platform and designing an intuitive, engaging experience. Based on conversations with my friends, here’s what they need: User-first approach (duh): Users own their data and private keys but don't know that at first. The experience starts as a simple username-password login (NIP-07). Onboarding: There needs to be a paywall (both fiat and BTC), with as little friction as possible. Forum-style discussions: Organize content into threads/topics so users can easily participate in conversations. Threaded discussions: Each thread allows for nested replies, much like Reddit or traditional forums, enabling deep, organized conversations. Tagging system: Let users tag content by topic or interest to make navigation easier. We don't want to overcomplicate things—just keep it simple. Make it a basic forum where they only see content from their community. Voting/Engagement system: Introduce upvoting, reactions, or comments on posts—this is easy. Now comes the magic of Nostr... with zaps (tips) or the ability to send money back and forth, users slowly realize that this is actually different. (You see? We’re getting there gradually.) Moderation tools: Yeah, I know this sounds lame, but some creators wouldn’t want their forum spammed with footstr pics (sorry, guys). Allow some users to moderate discussions, flag inappropriate content, or create private spaces within the community. This is the basic community client mvp. It would be enough for some creators who care about freedom and want to build a community on a self-sovereign level. The rest comes later down the road. Private and public spaces: Offer both public forums and private groups where users can control membership and discussions—more options for the user. Leaderboards: Show the most active or helpful members based on engagement, contributions, zaps, or participation. Reputation: WoT, yes baby—now we're getting closer to the full Nostr ecosystem. Achievements: Gamify the experience by rewarding users with badges or other forms of recognition for their engagement. User-controlled feed: Implement a home feed based on the relays and topics the user follows - this is where I would open up the whole nostr ecosystem (how? I have no clue yet). Analytics: Give admins and group leaders insights into community engagement, most active users, and popular threads. User feedback system: Allow users to provide feedback on discussions, groups, and content, enabling continuous improvement for the content creator / community owner but also for the client. These are my first thoughts. After brain-dumping all of this, I realize that this almost works as a white-label solution for creators. So… does this make sense? What do you think? I know it’s radically different from opening up the whole Nostr ecosystem to users, but I want to experiment with this. Based on conversations I’ve had, people would be overwhelmed by too much too soon. This also solves the problem of onboarding people and letting them follow random accounts. Here, they follow people with similar interests and those they already trust, which reflects trust onto the protocol as a whole. I’m not sure if this will eventually lead to users discovering the full beauty of the Nostr ecosystem, but hey—that’s for later down the road. At least this is running on nostr in the backend. Also, I have no idea how to code any of this. But I want to make it happen. This is me starting an open conversation. Let’s see where this takes us and how we can make it happen together. 🧡

Replies (15)

Influencers will come after the crowd anyway. They're going where their audience is growing (if they're smart enough). Community is not youtubers, artists or whoever 'famous'. Nostr is for anyone, you don't need to change it or adapt for specific part of community. That is so stupid. Twitter or Facebook or YouTube or whatever never did anything like you propose. We must grow our community and our self-hosted Nostr influencers.
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As mentioned by you, this is community building basics, plus Nostr capabilities on top. I was running the #SAP community platform for 10 years but bad business/UX decisions recently ruined the experience. Not hard to envision a solution stack like Ditto or Iris targeted towards large business communities (see platformOS, Khoros, Vanilla Forums, etc). Nostr could shine here, but enabling users to add Bitcoin to their wallets is still a hard UX problem that needs solving. Has anybody already enabled transfer from PayPal? Anything I’m missing here besides the usual “PayPal is evil” resistance?
Super interesting concept. Clear value proposition for content creators and influencers that will enable them to protect their communities. Private relay implementation can hel on this and each one can estblish their own fees.
Attempted to build this with coracle.tools. It's mostly a proof-of-concept at this point, although I think what it's proven is that the approach needs to be slightly different, hence flotilla.coracle.social (WIP). I think chat over forums is probably a better emphasis, but agree with much of what you're saying.
Great start for outlining the use case. Not everyone in the world is as passionate about free speech as nostr early adopters. They are not as ideologically opposed to any limitations on visibility or access. In fact, they see a lot of posts as noise that detracts from the JTBD that brought them here. In the case you outlined, that JTBD is following a creator and connecting with his community. So you w laid out a very sensible onboarding flow for that customer segment. Game designers have known this for decades. You don’t take a brand new player and drop them in the middle of the final boss battle with the full plethora of weapons and unlocks. It’s overwhelming and makes for a horrible UX. Instead you take them through “basic training” and give them a sense of progress, accomplishment, and most importantly… fun! Gradually unlock tools and features as you become more comfortable and engaged. You can even gamify the engagement to an extent, eg to unlock features you have to earn certain engagement badges, etc.
Some of this is along the lines of other devs thinking, particularly the forums component. We'll develop it eventually, or augment existing software. We need to promote more apps that are not based on seemingly indefinite scrolling feed views. Stop personally onboarding to Amethyst, Damus and the like. And improve onboarding and community features for - Nostr Build, Void Cat - Oddbean - Flockstr - Flare pub and Zap Stream - Zap Cooking - Corny Chat, Hivetalk Nostr Nests - Fountain, Wavlake
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This is somewhat similar to the experiments I’ve been doing with protest.net on nostr. So far I have ditto and flockstr but it’s not got the inward community focus figured out. You said nip-07 but what I think you meant was nip46 hosted nsec bunker like how fountain works. Users can have their nsec but day to day it works like logging in to a normal service on the web. Think Coinbase service for nostr.