NostrHub 2.0: A Meritocracy for Building Nostr Together

Nostr is a mycelial network. It's connected through the ground. In the best case you won't see it, but you'll feel it.

At AOS Convergence 2026, we saw the results from Superbloom's Nostr development survey: "Faster alone, farther together?"

It highlighted issues of coordination in the Nostr ecosystem, exactly what NostrHub was created to solve. Many people echoed that sentiment in person. So we took the feedback and built a new version of NostrHub from the ground up.

Democracy

NIPs on GitHub are centralized. GitHub itself is centralized, but the NIPs repo is also an oligarchy of people who get to decide which NIPs are real (I'm one such oligarch).

There's an ancient issue on GitHub titled Decentralizing the NIPs registry in which much drama ensued. People were critical of the top-down approach.

I created the first version of NostrHub out of spite, because fiatjaf closed Chad's geocaching NIP pull request. He took issue that it was generated by AI, although in my opinion the quality exceeded a lot of the human slop left open or even merged. We built AI context files to make the AI write NIPs in the tone of the NIPs repo. We even created a fake version of fiatjaf we argued with, to understand his positions. Recently the real fiatjaf relented and merged geocaching as an official NIP, NIP-CC.

That first NostrHub got covered in spam. Then ManiMe added web-of-trust scoring to it, which improved the quality, but it was still missing a way for a NIP to become "official."

For NostrHub 2.0 I wanted NIPs to be enshrined. To get there, I figured I'd have to build a democracy. Or so I thought.

I looked into decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). I stressed about adding people to a group and kicking them off. I thought a lot about Ethereum.

When I mentioned all this to fiatjaf, he replied with sarcasm: "Voting? That sounds like a recipe for disaster." He was right.

Democracy basically means government by the people. Of the people. For the people. But the people are retarded.

— Osho

But what was the alternative, fascism? fiatjaf has been accused of being one by dishonest journalists, but I knew there was more to the story.

So I traced that infamous "but the people are retarded" line back to its full speech by Osho. The Indian philosopher's answer was not fascism. It was meritocracy.

Democracy cannot be the highest possibility man can attain. It is good in comparison to other forms of government that have preceded it. But not something that can succeed it. I call it meritocracy. I want a government by the people of merit.

— Osho

But how do you build a meritocracy? Is it even possible?

A meritocracy is a system ruled by experts. But who decides who the experts are? Measuring impact is subjective. Choose the wrong experts and you've built an authoritarianism. Choose the right ones and you've built a benevolent dictatorship, arguably the rarest and best form of society.

Meritocracy

My solution for NostrHub 2.0 was to ship a default set of experts, but make them configurable by the user.

Instead of a "Follow" button, profiles on NostrHub have an "add as expert" button. You can remove experts too. Experts wear a shield badge above their avatar wherever they appear, so you always know whose judgment you're looking at.

To choose the default experts, I simply took the top twelve contributors of the existing NIPs repo on GitHub: fiatjaf, hodlbod, Vitor Pamplona, PABLOF7z, jb55, Kieran, mattn, and the rest. There are strong signals of expertise in that list, and leaning on it keeps my personal bias out of the defaults. Since users can customize it, we get the best of both worlds: a subjective meritocracy.

Anyone can approve a NIP on NostrHub. Approvals are NIP-32 label events, so they're just ordinary Nostr data. But only approvals from your experts count toward a NIP becoming "official." NIPs are ranked by how many experts approved them. Change your experts, and the rankings rearrange themselves around your trust.

The Community

Not everyone can be an expert. What about the rest of us?

Here's where the mycelium spreads. From the experts, NostrHub derives a much larger community. It combines the follow lists of every expert, ranks each followed account by how many experts follow them, and caps the result at 1,000 (configurable, or you can turn the cap off entirely). The experts and you are always included.

So to be seen on NostrHub you have to have already earned the attention of people the experts trust. You engage with the developer community through clients like Amethyst, Coracle, and Ditto first. You do good work. The trust flows back through the network to you.

This is what kills the spam that drowned NostrHub 1.0. Not a moderator, not a captcha, not a blocklist. Just the shape of the network itself. The same community set scopes everything downstream: comments, chat, the plan graph, the apps, the repos. One trust primitive applied everywhere.

Building Nostr Together

I've been trying to figure out a way for people to collaborate on a bigger-picture strategy for Nostr. The goal is to align people so that we can identify problems and missing gaps together and tackle the highest-value issues.

I started by creating a simple public chat with AI agent integration, loosely inspired by Block's Sprout (now Buzz). I didn't feel I had quite nailed it, so I then tried building a collaborative mindmap I called Plan.

These are both experiments and I'm not satisfied with either solution yet. Play around with them and let me know what you think.

These experiments inspired us to create Armada, an upcoming community chat client we're building at Soapbox. We may extend Armada with collaboration features like this, and definitely with AI agents. We'd also like to start organizing weekly community video calls hosted on NostrHub. More on that later!

NIPs, Apps, and Repos

NIPs are the heart, but a protocol is only as real as the software that implements it. So NostrHub closes the loop.

The app directory lists applications announced on Nostr itself, as NIP-89 handler events, with no central submission. The community then rates how well each app actually implements each NIP, ProtonDB-style: Flawless, Incomplete, Isolated, or Borked. Because these reports are themselves Nostr events, the ratings can flow between clients instead of being trapped in one. Interoperability, measured interoperably.

And there are git repos. NostrHub implements NIP-34: code that lives on Nostr, announced over relays, cloneable from anywhere, owned by no forge. You can spin up a brand-new repo entirely in the browser and push it straight to a GRASP server (a relay that doubles as a git host), or mirror an existing GitHub repo onto Nostr in a few clicks. The repo pages are laid out GitHub-style, with issues, pull requests, and a file browser, except there's no GitHub underneath.

We started by trying to escape GitHub's oligarchy over the NIPs. We ended up rebuilding the good parts of GitHub itself, the proposals, discussion, code, and issues, on a substrate nobody owns, governed by a meritocracy you control.

Farther Together

Superbloom asked whether we'd go "faster alone, or farther together?" The honest answer is that Nostr has spent years going fast alone. Brilliant developers building brilliant things in parallel, occasionally colliding, rarely coordinating.

NostrHub is my attempt at the "together" without giving up the things that make Nostr worth it: no central server deciding what's real, no committee you have to beg, no king. Just a network of trust you can see, shape, and grow, with experts at the core, a community in the canopy, and a mycelial web of NIPs, plans, apps, and code connecting it all through the ground.

It's not a democracy. It's not a dictatorship. It's a meritocracy you configure yourself. And for the first time, I think it can actually work.

Come build Nostr with us at nostrhub.io.