Why Bitcoin: The Base Layer of Freedom Tech
Two weeks in the Mediterranean, one question at every dinner table: why does a social media company need Bitcoin? The answer is about freedom, not price.
Team Soapbox
Soapbox creates tools that put the power back in your hands. Build your own platforms, communities, and applications with our open-source toolkit for Nostr.
Curated by
MK Fain
Self-hosted auto-moderation for Armada: meet Master-at-Arms
Armada Communities are serverless and end-to-end encrypted, so the relay can't moderate for you. Here is the bot we built to watch every message and act on spam in seconds, and how to run it yourself.
Leaving GitHub: A Decentralized Git Alternative on Nostr
GitHub is one company, one jurisdiction and one takedown notice away from your project being a 404. That is why we moved Armada off it and onto Nostr. Here is what actually replaced it, what it cost us, and why the daily loop is still just git push.
How to Self-host Armada: Open Source Discord Alternative
Armada communities already run without a host. Here is how to own the rest: the app you load, the relay your messages travel over, and the server your calls go through.
Buzz made me rethink how teams use agents
Block's new workspace put agents in the member list, and it clarified something we'd been stumbling toward for two years: agents should be themselves when they need to be themselves, and extensions of their humans when that's appropriate.
Building an Armada: Our Voyage to Encrypted Communities on Nostr
NIP-04, NIP-17, NIP-29, Marmot, and now Concord. A personal account of every wall we hit trying to build encrypted communities on Nostr, and why we kept going.
How Soapbox Ships So Fast: Our Stack, Our Tools, Our Workflow
People keep asking how a small team ships so many Nostr apps so fast. The honest answer: there's no secret. It's all open source, and it's all in our Toolbox. Here's the whole playbook.
NostrHub 2.0: A Meritocracy for Building Nostr Together
NostrHub 2.0 is a Nostr-native hub where developers build the protocol together. Not a democracy, not a dictatorship, but a configurable meritocracy curated by Nostr experts, with NIPs, a plan graph, apps, and git repos.
How to Disappear From the Surveillance Internet
The UK's under-16 social media ban means age-checks for everyone. Here's how to opt out with Nostr, Bitcoin, NostrVPN &
Treasures: The Adventure Update
Treasures celebrates its one year anniversary with a series of big, adventurous updates!
Soapbox at Bitcoin 2026: Nostr Became Infrastructure
How Bitcoin Conference Week 2026 played out for Soapbox: five panels, NosVegas 2.0, V4V music payouts, and Nostr finally landing as infrastructure.
The Chameleon Method: Three Skills That Future-Proof You in the Age of AI
The three C's: Critical Thinking, Creativity, Communication, are durable in a way that technical skills aren't. They transfer across tools, industries, roles, and eras. They're what made humans valuable before AI, and they're what will make humans valuable after AI becomes ubiquitous.
Communities, Flowers in Bloom
A brief flow of thought on the nature of communities and how they relate to flowers.
Small Business Owners Don't Fear AI -- They're Hungry for It
What I learned teaching a two-part AI seminar to local entrepreneurs.
Coding Doesn't Die. It Evolves.
Elon Musk says coding dies by December. He's right about the direction. He's wrong about the conclusion. The future belongs to people who can think.
Building Onyx: Why I'm Creating an Open Source Alternative to Big Tech's AI Productivity Tools
Big Tech wants to lock your productivity into their AI platforms and mine your data. I'm building the alternative. Onyx: encrypted notes, Nostr sync, open source, AI skills library. Your data stays yours.
Vibe Coding at One: From Meme to Movement
One year ago, Andrej Karpathy coined 'vibe coding.' It became a dictionary word. At Soapbox, we've spent that year building the tools to make it work—not just for throwaway projects, but for real applications that matter.
Building Pathos: From Hackathon to Real-World Activism
We built a censorship-resistant platform for activists in 48 hours. Within hours, Venezuelan activists were using it to organize against authoritarianism.
AI-First Development on Mobile: Shakespeare Changes the Game
Unlike dedicated mobile coding apps that have failed to gain traction, Shakespeare is a Progressive Web App that delivers a full development experience on mobile with Nostr Git sync.
