nostr

Community building at the edge of the Internet

What if your community could exist without phone numbers, email addresses or third party websites? What if all your community needed to provide digital services to its constituents was a Nostr Relay on the Local Area Network?

Why Build a Nostr Community Hub?

The internet has given us incredible tools for connection, yet most community spaces (Facebook groups, Discord servers, Slack workspaces) operate on a fundamental trade-off: you hand over your identity and data in exchange for access. When you leave the platform, you leave behind your connections, your content, and your history. There are good alternatives, but most of them are only available through the Internet and, if they go down, everything the community has achieved goes with it.

Nostr changes this equation entirely. In its paradigm, your identity is a cryptographic keypair that only you control. Your npub (public key) is your username, and your nsec (private key) is your password. There's no "forgot password" email reset because there's no central server holding your account. You can use this identity across dozens of clients, relays, networks, or generate entirely separate identities for different contexts. Want one identity for your local bar community and another for professional networking? Easy. No phone number verification, no email confirmation, no "real name" policy. You and your community define what your identity means.

The problem is that Nostr is very new and thus its pioneers often face a cold-start problem: they generate a key, open a client, connect to a public relay, and are immediately hit with crypto spam and content they didn't sign up for.

A community hub solves this elegantly.

A "Pyramid", but... portable

Pyramid is the name of a Nostr relay software. It acts as the anchor: a clean, moderated space where your community's notes, images, and conversations live.

This is a feature-rich Nostr server that includes:

Group Chats via NIP-29 communities
Collaborative Git repositories via GRASP, for shared documents or community projects
Member-only relay access with whitelist controls, based on invitation from existing members.
Blossom server for binary file uploads—images, video reels, music, PDFs, all stored on your own infrastructure

👀 Behold Dyne.org's pyramid relay:

See yourself in the Invite Tree? Invite a dyne from the channels!

Don't see yourself in it? Ask a dyne in the channels to invite you!

Ask for an invite! 👋

Rumble in the Jumble, community mode

"Jumble" is a Progressive Web App (PWA) that runs a Nostr client.

It is shipped with a so-called "Community Mode", which lets you predefine a set of default relays for the people leveraging your build of the PWA. Basically, when someone visits your custom Jumble instance (i.e jumble.your-community-domain.tld), they're immediately connected to your curated relay ecosystem. Not the global firehose.

🪇 Here is dyne.org's community client:

A cosy digital place

It's cheap

This setup can run on very scarce resources and can easily migrate. It can even be decommissioned with near-zero collateral costs for the people using it: the people never depend on a relay. A person or a bot having to change their Nostr in/out-boxes is the worst-case scenario.

The escape hatch is always open

Once they get the gist of it, people can start exploring other clients, rather than your community's build. Maybe they collaborate on another GRASP (Git over Nostr)? Maybe they want a client for live-streaming? Maybe they want to add the relay accessible in their LBAN (Local Bar's Area Network) in the settings of the client of their choice, because they want to vote for the next Karaoke track? They can always explore communities beyond, with the identity of their choice. Your community hub is just providing a warm, welcoming starting point for a journey through cyberspace. Not an enshitifyable cage.

This setup is ideal for:

Local bars and cafes that want a digital bulletin board and social space for regulars.
Neighborhood communities sharing events, recommendations, and lost cat notices.
Interest groups (book clubs, running crews, gardening collectives) that want a private-ish space without building a whole Discord server
Small businesses looking for a lightweight customer community platform and an easy way to update their website through an app.

How do I use it?

You need an identity. One identity is two things:

An npub. This is a unique public identifier of your identity.
An nsec. This is the secret key. The one that controls it all and must stay secret for as long as it takes.

If you are starting from scratch, create an identity using an app. No internet needed. This is confusing at first, and there are many new words in the authentication flow: "remote signer", "authenticator", "bunker", "passkey"... Essentially, the app is the tool that allows you to "log in to your account". It leverages some cool Planet Dyne adjacent technology from Lugano, code-named NIP-46

Nostr | NIPs

Documentation site for NIPs

Nextra

Super 1337 users will want to look at the CLI tool: nak

# generate a secret key

~> nak key generate
1e90fa2e277921992920dfc4fc9126896e9a3af8ee0fa57fe8dbbf302ac90e68

# generate a public key from the secret one
~> nak key public 1e90fa2e277921992920dfc4fc9126896e9a3af8ee0fa57fe8dbbf302ac90e68
6cf7e488d65abbebd032336101c43d1f2e2a93ccc97856388a28f79e017f9336

At the time of writing, it's unclear if such an app exists on iOS, but on Android, there's this one:

Then, to log in, you can point at the QR from a web app and log in.

You can also create and manage identities using extensions for your browser:

Firefox

Chrome

But let's talk about wss://relay.dyne.org for a moment!

The dyne.org community can use wss://relay.dyne.org as outbox (write) to save a profile, write notes, share photos and videos, collaborate on Git repositories, and chat in groups. All while everyone maintains full control over their own identity. For inbox (read), thats is incomming stuff, like DMs, replies, reactions to one's content, zaps, etc...) the community can use wss://relay.dyne.org/inbox

You can see your relay settings here: https://nostr.dyne.org/settings/relays

The Pyramid website is useful in some ways. For example, you can set up your NIP-05. This is just a funky way to write your npub. Say your nick is belli, now people can find your npub by searching for belli@relay.dyne.org .

You'll find those settings by clicking your username in the upper-right corner when you are logged in to the relay interface here:

On the Pyramid web UI, you will also find that there is a GRASP server. Read more about GRASP here:

grasp: a simple protocol for decentralized git

Nomadic Group Chats anyone? This client is cool for that:

And a blossom server to store your pictures and videos! You can store up to 256Mb of goodness on there. Blossom is a wonderful concept for portable binary data. Read about it here, or just try out a client that manages your blossoms here:

bouquet

Learn more!

The UX of nostr is wild; there's an increase in interest among builders, fueling all sorts of client development. Rumble in the Jungle, essentially! If you tested the Dyne.org community build of Jumble, you might have noticed that one relay in the network is Spatia-arcana.com. They've written extensively to help onboard new people. I urge you to consult the manual they're developing here: