A spectrum instead of a wall

In the vocabulary Hess and Ostrom built for information commons, a relay is a facility: it stores artifacts and makes them available, with membership rules, conduct rules, and real maintenance costs. The signed events it stores are the artifacts — discrete, observable, nameable representations, here with cryptographic identity — and the discourse they carry is the idea layer, nonrivalrous and enriched rather than depleted by use ({{ref:concept-ideas-artifacts-facilities|ideas artifacts facilities}}). Every relay operator holds what the property-rights literature calls a proprietor's bundle: management and exclusion over the facility — but no alienation over anyone's identity, because keys and follow graphs leave with the user ({{ref:concept-property-rights-bundles|property-rights bundles}}).

Boundary rules therefore do not disappear on Nostr; they multiply, localize, and become elastic ({{ref:concept-boundary-rules|boundary rules}}). Relays sit on {{ref:claim-relay-spectrum|a spectrum with three poles, not two}}. At one end, the hard allowlist floor: a bounded institution, membership set once — the set-once-boundary world the CPR literature knows. At the other, the open pool, where exclusion must be solved some other way. The structural novelty is the middle: curated relays that still speak the base event kinds, so a user joins a real community without leaving the commons. In Levine's terms, these are associational commons composing on a libertarian one ({{ref:src-collective-action-ukac|Levine}}) — and the composition is the point, not the sorting. Fuster Morell showed that in online creation communities, infrastructure provision is the governance dimension that silently determines the others, and that communities are empowered against providers exactly insofar as the platform is forkable. Nostr disaggregates that dimension itself: provision is plural and substitutable, so her cross-case typology of provision models reappears as live market structure inside one system ({{ref:concept-infrastructure-provision|infrastructure provision}}).