In addition to Pyramid’s Features, pt 1, and all the relays you have at your disposal, you also have an array of other tools to build and enhance your community. Of these tools, some can be utilized by members while others offer the option of public interaction so that your community grow through exposure and function as more of an oasis than an island.

Media Hosting:

Your Pyramid comes pre-equipped with a blossom media server for you and your members, enabling immediate uploading of images, videos, and other media files with no defined storage limits. The default settings can be changed to disable this, if you prefer, or you may set storage limits based on the available storage of your VPS rental and your anticipated needs. If you are looking to host a community that produces a lot of video content, you will want to make sure you are able to provide an ample amount of storage. If you are bootstrapping your community on a shoestring budget, setting up lower storage capacity can help you stay within your VPS limits, avoiding excessive usage charges or technical problems. As the Pyramid owner, you can manage, moderate, and organize these media files with Pyramid’s built-in FTP server. If you are not familiar with FTP, take some time to research and learn while your community is still small and easy to manage. Your first members will likely be the most trustworthy of your community and also the most patient as you figure out the ins and outs of community hosting. To get your members uploading their files from within their favorite Nostr client, ask them to add the URL of your pyramid homepage (https://<yourdomain.com>) to their profile’s media server list.

Chat Groups:

Chat groups on Nostr are still relatively new but they are becoming more stable, vibrant, and feature-rich by the day. Your Pyramid comes with a dedicated chat relay for hosting and managing chat groups. When enabled, any member of your community can create chat groups that are public, by private invite, member-restricted, or any mix of these options. Both the Pyramid owner and the creator of each group can moderate these chats. Various Nostr chat clients offer different features, though the core chat functionality is the same throughout all of them. Chat groups can be created from your Pyramid homepage or from within any Nostr chat client. I reccommend exploring some existing chat groups or creating “disposable” chats from the linked clients on your Pyramid’s homepage, and experimenting with different features and settings to see how they function in different clients. If you are looking to form your chat groups with a particular style ( i.e. professional vs casual), you may find that directing members to a particular client can help you achieve your desired outcome, while still keeping the accessiblity to the core chat function available to members through any chat-enabled client.

Grasp:

Grasp, in the simplest sense I can convey, is a protocol for annoucing and sharing repositories, for git over nostr (ngit). If you already know what Grasp is, and you’re reading this, there is a high probabilty that you don’t need me explaining this to you (and I couldn’t even, if you wanted me to)… if you have no clue but you have members who are programmers, they may appreciate if you have this feature enabled. Only do so if you feel comfortable. If you would like to learn more about ngit and Grasp, visit this page.

Statistics:

Pyramid collects a variety of stats for you and your members about event kinds and trends over time. Each member can view their own posting statistics on their account information tab of the relay’s homepage. The aggregated community statistics are also available on a dedicated tab, providing a detailed snapshot of posting trends, popular content kinds, and appearance frequency of both members and nonmembers, for an overview of community health, visibilty, and activity. You can use these to statistics to measure growth over time, find individuals that you would like to invite into your Pyramid, or any other metric.

Threads:

Your Pyramid relay can also be host to Discussion Threads, a topic-centric method of posting notes. While this is a relatively young development on Nostr, the opportunity to create informative threads around topics that your community cares about, is one to consider. You can create and access Discussion Threads from within chat clients and some general social clients. Viewing threads from within chat clients limits the viewable discussion to that of existing community members and to content that is hosted on the community relay, while viewing them in compatible social clients opens a view of the conversation to include participants who are outside of the community.

Now that we’ve taken a look at all of Pyramid’s major features, we can move on to looking at what it really means to manage a community relay and some tools help us do that, in a later piece.

To jump off this mediocre-hype train right now and get started on your own, visit https://github.com/fiatjaf/pyramid?tab=readme-ov-file#pyramid