• Consider
• Familiarize
• Prepare
• Execute

Managing a Nostr based community is not far removed from managing any other online community or group, except in that you do not have a 3rd party to mitigate situations on your behalf. As with everything, there are tradeoffs. While you don’t have some person to do the research into legalities, you also don’t have a corporation to unreasonably suspend your members or shut down your group on the basis of offending their advertisers or some other strange company policy. There are a few other key differences, in the tools that you can use and how the distribution of moderation is handled. We will address some of those here.

§Consider

Firstly, if you have never ran an online group before, consider beforehand how you might want your community to grow. If you want to host a small group of friends & family or around a niche hobby, you likely don’t need to do much preparation outside of

. Pyramid is light-weight so you can host thousands of members without spending a fortune on your VPS rental. If you are looking to grow a large online community, around a popular shared interest like gaming, gardening, cooking, politics, or Taylor Swift, you may want to plan in advance for some of your expected needs. You won’t know exactly what you need until you need it, but some basic knowledge can help you be prepared for a large influx of members and activity. Ample VPS storage space, reliable uptime, additonal moderators, familiarity with the tools, and a grasp on any regulations in your juristiction (and those of your members) are each worth consideration. Your VPS can be upgraded later, if needed, should you decide to start small. Starting out with a extra storage may be worth the cost of avoiding the pain of migration later. As far as legalities go, assess the risks of hosting and decide how much of that burden you are willing to bear. Nostr’s censorship-resistent qualities do not mean that you are beholden to taking risks that you do not want to take. You are free to moderate your community as lightly or as heavily as you choose. That is the beauty of Nostr. It makes us each responsible for own speech, spaces, and interactions.

§Familiarize

Once you get your Pyramid relay up and running, you will first want to familiarize yourself with its features and compatible Nostr clients for each. Exploring through the homepage interface will give you the knowledge you need to properly equip your members with some of the tools they can use to get the most out of their memberships. There are many other compatible social clients and specialized tools that integrate well with Pyramid’s array features beyond the suggested defaults. Discovering those will take time. You can leverage the knowledge of other Pyramid runners in a dedicated chat group, by asking around, or just exploring. The more prepared you are to educate your members, the smoother, funner, and more useful the community will be for everyone involved. Your relay can act as nearly any of the essential parts of using Nostr for social media, chat groups, and collaborative work. Knowing what options you have unlocks the potential of what your community can do.

§Prepare

Your Pyramids’s interface offers basic moderation tools, with options to disable or drop members, delete chat groups, block content types, and manage all blossom uploads. It also has quick links to specialized moderation tools where you can check for reports, take action, view lists of banned pubkeys, and remove content. As a Pyramid owner, you will find that some Nostr clients offer convenient moderation tools, too. Your main and subrelays can be accessed though the Relay Tools App for Android, giving you quick access to content removal and author blocks. This way, you can moderate while you browse and interact with your Nostr social feeds. For group chats, Flotilla will allow you to moderate from right inside its interface as well. You can ban/restore members, delete content, adjust group settings, and more. Outside of the chat groups, Flotilla also enables you to delete Discussion Threads and replies that are hosted on your Pyramid. Other tools, like Relay Guardian can be set to monitor your relay for outages and send you a notification when its down. Check out this

for some other suggestions. This is a quickly evolving field of development on Nostr, so check back for updates to the list.

§Execute

• Your Pyramid is up and running
• You’ve explored its features
• You’ve familiarized yourself with community managing and moderating
• You’ve tried the tools available

All that is left to do is to invite some members and breathe some life into this thing. In our next entry, we will put together a basic member guide, to help you share with your members all the things they can do with their Pyramid memberships. You can point your members towards it for more information or you can copy it into a blog article of your own, make changes, and pin it to the top of your Pyramid’s /interal relay feed. :)