Online communities are a bastion of meaningful communication in a growing unidirectional networking. Groups I’ve joined over time are all hosted on Slack, Discord and Telegram - all proprietary software handling well public and invite-only groups.

What about paid memberships?

Paid membership is a great filter for spam.

Paid membership amplifies my motivation to immerse into an activity, like a gym or a language course.

A useful feature rarely available. Discord offers community subscriptions only to US based server owners, with high fees and strict terms. Other platforms outsource to third-party integrations - bots and automations - another layer of complexity and risk.

With technology at disposal, we can do better.

  • Nostr is a social protocol which facilitates identity, direct and group messages.

  • Lightning network is a payment protocol for fast and cheap transactions.

Here is an idea: open-source app tailored for online communities, built on top of Nostr and Lightning.

How would the flow look like?

  • Group landing page has an input field for your Nostr public key.

  • Enter and get Lightning invoice generated.

  • Pay invoice and your Nostr account can connect to the group private relay through a custom client with familiar experience.

Unique features

As paid community grows, valuable content needs to scale. Owner can allocate funds to stimulate other members' contributions.

Community members usually want to connect on public media. Besides internal view, the app would offer public feed (visible only to group members) of all member activity over public relays.

Sounds interesting?