No single party should have total control, there should be no single point of failure.
The “blogosphere” provides a model I like in the abstract:
Everyone maintains and is responsible for the uptime of their own forum.
The owner of a forum is the owner in a very real sense, they also take on the responsibility of being that forum’s maintainer, moderator and sysadmin.
It must be relatively easy to create a new forum.
Too easy is a real thing, however:
Maintaining the quality of a forum is a long term responsibility.
The network should not be filled with ghost-town or spam/slop forums.
For now, I think the following is an acceptable amount of complexity:
Clone forum-host repo
Edit a json config or whatever to configure forum settings
Run the binary/script
A web admin UI can be created later.
There should be some standard for implementing search of messages and threads, and every forum must provide a standards-complaint endpoint to be part of the network.
Similar to above, forums must publish a standards-complaint “about this forum” endpoint.
RSS seems like something that should be emulated. Perhaps it can be directly used for this?
People have:
an Identity, a cryptographic keypair that proves who they are, and
a Forum Profile, which is some data (nickname, profile picture, roles, biography, etc.) associated with the public key of an Identity.
Since user accounts are cryptographic identities with no centralized authority, infinite amounts of accounts can be made to circumvent bans.
Other than the obvious solution of creating a whitelist-only forum, moderators can also set a high default “stamp cost” for new users, and lower the stamp cost for trusted users. This also deals with the issue of spam.
Since forums are really just independent programs that conform to a set of standards, each forum can have arbitrarily complex moderation tools.
The forum-host repo should provide a basic web UI for users.
It should be something that can be served as simply as
python3 -m http.server -d webui. All required dependencies
should be included in the repo.
It’s possible one of these projects has already done a very large amount of the heavy lifting.
Nostr Apps is a directory of software using nostr.
How to nostr is “a book intended for developers who want to get familiar with nostr on a deeper level so that they can design decentralized applications and model data more effectively.”
Last edited: Sunday, February 15, 2026 12:55:04 AM PST