I'm a bit old-fashioned when it comes to online discussions. I like good, slow, asynchronous discussions. Readable and searchable archives are essential. Most communities have abandoned forums in favor of group chats. With the rise in popularity of Discord and Telegram groups, the same questions get posted over and over, and good answers get lost in a sea of chats.

For this reason I created Squalk (https://github.com/dtonon/squalk), a classic forum built on the Nostr open protocol. https://nostr-proto.org is the pilot community, about the protocol itself.

Nostr, as open protocol, offers some interesting points:

* There are no classic accounts controller by a central entity; you sign in with a cryptographic keypair, and your identity and post history are portable: the same key works on every other Nostr app.

* The forum is just a view over data hosted by a "relay", that is actually a very simple server. Any other client that speaks the same spec, like Flotilla or Nostrord, can read and write the same conversations. If my website dies, the community and its history do not.

* A complex web server is optional. Squalk builds either as a static SPA or as a server rendered Node app from the same codebase (SvelteKit); the SSR mode exists so threads are crawlable and land in search engines, which is half the point of a forum.

I admit it, each room still has a chat sidebar. I started pointing out that chat eats knowledge, but the trick is deciding what it is allowed to eat. Quick and dirt brainstorming, debugging sessions, and half-formed ideas belong in the chat, the conclusions worth keeping get written down as a thread. The sidebar is deliberately secondary: it feeds the forum instead of replacing it.

Nostr is young, key management is still rough for normal people, and moderation tooling on relays needs improvement. But I think slow forum dynamics actually fit the protocol better than the Twitter clones it is known for, so I will continue to explore this idea.

Feedback on both the forum and the software is very welcome!

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