Forumstr: Empowering Community with Nostr Microapps
There was once a time where the internet seemed like a free place to me. I was able to live so freely. I was 12 years old; I lived in a rough neighborhood and I was a total nerd, so I didn’t really fit in very well. Though, there were these incredible places I could spend my time where I did fit in and my curiosities were satisfied as a teenager. This place was the internet.
On the internet, there were many federated communities ran on forum software like phpBB and vBulletin. These forums were for specific communities, my interests ranged from counter strike: source, private game servers, world of warcraft, warez, and hacking forums. They all taught me so much. The first of which I became a contributing member of was [RaGEZONE](http://forum.ragezone.com).
The forums were magical in a way. Locally, at school outside the classroom I would get into fights daily due to bullying and me standing up for myself. While in the classroom, most of the time the teachers at school would be screaming at us, fearful of being challenged or asked difficult questions, tyrants, or just completely not noteworthy. I think out of all my years of going to public school, I had two great teachers that actually dramatically impacted me in a positive way.
On the forums, contrary to school, had their own distinct culture that made it really fun to participate in and learn from. For example, I was a humble kid from Phoenix, AZ but the forum allowed me to interact with many folks from the UK and all over Europe, all while learning about design of signatures using tools like Adobe Photoshop, develop personality over the internet with avatars and written prose, then hacking together SQL databases and PHP web apps that can interact with private game servers for games such as Mu Online, World of Warcraft, Maple Story, and much more.
For fun, you could head to the WoW forums to gossip and watch big personalities on a server clash. It made the world in-game actually feel somewhat real like a small town, which was really cool. **It felt like true belongingness and a real community**. Occasionally, you would get really toxic types, but we all embraced them and knew that was their personality. They would become somewhat infamous on the server and epic when you would run across them in-game. It made for entertaining drama.
There was little moderation and community control, which really allowed you to get to know someone and for them to still have presence. There were plugins that the server admin of the forum could install, with one of the prominent uses as reputation, join date and awards to allow for status and reputation. Because of this, you could have a positive or negative reputation because a user of a forum could + / - your rep of points, with a limit on the amount of times you could do so and the amount of rep you, yourself had the amount of rep points vary based on how much positive or negative reputation points you had accrued. You could also find some very cool effects with usernames that were visible on these forums.
Lots of cliques would emerge from this and even allow for a deeper culture within the forum to emerge amongst its members, along with some great perks such as getting a new status when you hit 1,000+ posts, been a member longer than 5 years, get a special rank from an admin of the server, or something of that nature, which could grant you access to restricted access forums.
**Again, this created an even deeper sense of community and strong retention.**
Sadly, over-time, these forums became less and less active as social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and prominently Reddit became more popular. These forums slowly died out as people slowly consolidated to these massive social media hubs. People stopped visiting, content became curated rather than organic from the community members themselves, & social media founders and managers gained a significant amount of power due to being able to censor user’s posts whether they’re true or not, choose ultimately who becomes a moderator, or banning users out right, limiting the freeness of the internet.
Previously, it was fine because if you got banned from a forum, you could easily register a new account and start over again under a new alias or move to a new forum. It was a learning opportunity, especially for folks like myself. With centralized services like Reddit and Facebook, it became really easily to prevent users from registering again, detecting them, censoring them with content moderators, staff, and AI without a chance for growth in one’s personality or social skills.
Reputation really didn’t exist beyond basic forms like karma and now you were posting under your personal identity, which is tied directly to your family members. It becomes more restrictive to post freely what you think, crack jokes, not take sides, or interact with people from faraway places that you would not normally chat with.
The posts become flooded with memes and other mindless things rather than new and interesting topics to explore, debate ideas, and find other who shares your same interests.
Introduce other new problems that have previously been outlined by nostriches and the protocol creator himself, fiatjaf. For example, when a user gets banned, they lose everything as you cannot take your following with you, and have no backups of your data (for most folks). It’s possible to get shadow banned without even knowing it for political beliefs, getting cancelled for something you posted a decade ago, ads, and prioritized content based on proprietary algorithms.
I think this presents a new opportunity to solve with nostr: **Forumstr**. Forums over nostr. We can rebuild the internet that was in my opinion great and solve a lot of the old problems that existed with these forums.
We can bring micro applications such as forumstr into any experience. A gaming portal of HTML5 where users can show off their nostr badges, carry their achievements with them, or perhaps a developer platform that wants a forum to discuss things and retain knowledge the knowledge.
**My vision:**
- New Events
- Events are super flexible allowing for iterative development starting simple and gradually building out more sophisticated functionality.
- Build their own aggregated “Reddit” with the forums and communities they most care about.
- Just like a user can create an event for preferred relays, they can do the same for preferred forums.
- Can use events to create subscriptions to specific forums and notify based on threads or new posts or certain from authors. Similar to RSS.
- Using Zaps we can prioritize content based on a combination of factors:
- Earn from your creations and support other high signal creators.
- Scarce and limited money rather than hidden algorithms we don’t have any insight into how they work to prioritize content
- Ignore ads because you can use any forum app of your choosing, all of which follows the same spec more or less, allowing for multiple monetization models to be experimented with.
- Activity data such as the latest post, number of posts, etc.
- Aggregated zaps by user on the platform to determine reputation, along with a points event that can be positive or negative.
- Followings can be brought with them since the user can set their preferred relay, so even if they are banned from a forum, they can still be found and be seen in other nostr forum apps. This will allow putting the user in control of who they care to interact with and see. Possibly their own curated block or mute lists.
- Badges
- We can use this to allow users to take their reputation with them and proudly display it on their profile if they so choose on multiple platforms.
- Use badges + encrypted messages to grant access to special forums.
- Access management such as enabling content moderators for specific forums.
- Relays
- Relays can be federated by forum community owner, or if they are advanced, they can send the events to the relays they wish to participate with for redundancy / resiliency and the user can save a copy of all the data to their own relay if they so choose.
- Make data accessible
- Nostr relays can charge a fee for access of data priced in satoshis allowing for the fetching of data as a subscription (monthly / yearly), pay-per-use using LNURL withdrawals so the user don’t incur mental transaction costs, life-time membership for a single payment as a member, or allow data to be accessed for free. Sophisticated users could even send every event they fetch and create to their own relay so they can have all their data widely accessible. Nostr relay business models can also be experimented with to see what works for what user personas.
- Enable multiple forum apps to be built all following the same spec
- This is the beauty of open networks and protocols. Apps like Apollo will never run into the Reddit issue ever again. They can start building and testing things right now while running their own relay and connecting to other relays without concern since there isn’t a central party making pricing decisions that can destroy your business.
Obviously, that is a lot of work to get there. I have started small and humble with a PoC implementation of forums over nostr. It just proves the event structure works with basic functionality. You can try it out at [forumstr.lol](https://forumstr.lol).
As I mentioned before, it just a proof-of-concept (PoC) implementation meaning that there are basic creating and reading functionality related to forums, threads, and comments. It’s enough to prove the event structure for forums, threads, and comments, and that this can work, though I am not going to argue that this is the best architecture or design as it is not. I welcome you to contribute. We can iteratively add support for multiple relays, zaps, amongst the other features I mention above.
This is a free and open source project; I welcome your feedback and PRs: https://github.com/zantoshi/forumstr.
My goal is to make the internet feel fun and free again, inspire curiosity and action, and new communities possible everywhere.
Much love,
Santos, some guy on the internet.
