Knowledge Base

Guides & resources

Welcome to the Flotilla knowledge base. Start with a guide, or jump to the topic you need — from joining your first space to running your own community.

Start here

2 articles

Guide

How to Run an Online Community You Actually Own

Starting an online community is easy. Keeping one that is truly yours — where no company can bury your posts, suspend your account, or switch the whole thing off — takes a little more thought. This guide walks you through starting, hosting, growing, and moderating a community you actually own, in plain language, with no prior knowledge assumed.

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Guide

What Is Nostr? A Plain-English Guide

You've probably run into the word "Nostr" and bounced straight off a wall of jargon. This guide skips all of that. In plain English, here's what Nostr actually is, why people care about it, and how it lets you own your identity and your community online — no technical knowledge required.

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Getting started

6 articles

What is Flotilla?

Flotilla is a platform for building and running online communities — chat, voice, video, threads, and events, all in one place. Think of it as an alternative to Discord or Slack, with one important difference: the community you build is one you truly own, and nobody can take it away from you.

Getting Started

To get started, visit app.flotilla.social. You'll be welcomed with two choices: Log in, if you've been here before, or Create an account, if you're new.

Installing Flotilla on Web and Mobile

Flotilla isn't locked behind an app store account or a platform login. It's a Nostr client, so the only thing you need to bring is your key (see Understanding Your Nostr Identity). How you run it is up to you: in a browser tab, installed as an app on your home screen, or as a native download on Android or iOS.

Ways to Log In to Flotilla

Flotilla has no username-and-password account. Instead, you prove who you are with a Nostr key (see Understanding Your Nostr Identity if you haven't already). But "using your key" isn't a single thing: the login screen offers several ways to bring that key in, and they aren't equally safe. This article walks through each one.

Setting Up Your Profile

Once you're signed in, you can change how you appear to everyone else at any time — your name, picture, bio, and a couple of optional extras. None of this touches your underlying Nostr key; it's just the public information attached to it. Here's where to find these settings and what each field does.

Joining a Space

There are two main ways to join a space on Flotilla: with an invite link, or by browsing to discover existing groups. If you're a community organizer, we recommend inviting your members with a link — the flow is much simpler for everyone.

Comparisons

4 articles

Flotilla as a Slack Alternative

If you are looking for an alternative to Slack, the first question worth asking is what you are actually running. Slack is workplace software: it is built for the employees of one company, chatting with each other, wired into the rest of their corporate tools. If that is you, Slack is probably the right tool. But a lot of people reach for Slack to run something it was never designed for — an open community, a club, a congregation, a volunteer network, a group that spans several organizations. This page is for that second group: organizers who want to own the community they build rather than rent it per seat. Flotilla is the Slack alternative built for them.

Flotilla: A Discord Alternative You Actually Own

If you're running a community on Discord and have started to wonder what happens if the rules change, the account gets suspended, or you simply want to move somewhere else one day, this article is for you. It's an honest comparison of Discord and Flotilla for organizers looking for an alternative to Discord — one where the community, the history, and the members are actually yours. We'll be fair about what Discord does well, clear about where it doesn't fit that goal, and careful not to overstate what Flotilla can do.

Flotilla: A Telegram Alternative for Community Owners

If you run a community on Telegram and you're starting to feel like a guest in your own house, this article is for you. Telegram is genuinely excellent at some things, but if what you actually want is real structure, real moderation, and a community you own rather than rent, Flotilla is built for that in ways Telegram isn't.

Flotilla: An Open Alternative to Mighty Networks

If you're weighing an alternative to Mighty Networks, you probably like the idea of an all-in-one home for your community but aren't sure about the price, the caps, or the fact that the whole thing lives on someone else's platform. This article is an honest comparison for organizers evaluating a Mighty Networks alternative: what Mighty is genuinely good at, where it leaves you exposed if ownership matters to you, and where Flotilla fits in.

Understanding Nostr

2 articles

Nostr Terms Explained

Flotilla is built to be usable without knowing anything about Nostr relays or cryptographic keys. Even so, a handful of Nostr-specific words show up in the app and across this knowledge base. This page isn't a deep dive into any of them — it's a quick-reference index. Each entry gives you the short answer in a sentence or two, then links to the article that explains it in full.

Understanding Your Nostr Identity

If you signed up for Flotilla using Getting Started, you already have a Nostr key. This article explains what that means — it's the biggest difference between Flotilla and a normal app, and the one thing you can't afford to get wrong — and then covers the practical side: backing your key up and getting back into your account later.

Using Flotilla

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Spaces and Rooms Explained

If you're coming from Discord or Slack, Flotilla will feel familiar fast. A couple of the underlying concepts work differently, though, and they're worth understanding before you dive in. The two you'll meet right away are Spaces and Rooms.

Chatting in a Space

Once you've joined a space, most of your time there happens in its rooms — the channels described in Spaces and Rooms Explained. Text rooms work like real-time chat: pick one from the navigation, type in the composer at the bottom, and hit send. This article covers the everyday mechanics of posting and interacting with messages once you're inside.

Direct Messages

Not every conversation belongs in a room. Flotilla also gives you direct messages (DMs) — private conversations with one person or a small group, kept separate from any space. You don't have to share a space with someone to message them. All you need is their Nostr identity.

Using Voice and Video Calls

Some Rooms in a Space are voice Rooms rather than text Rooms — live audio, with video and screen sharing available once you're in. They behave like any other Room type: they sit in the sidebar alongside the text Rooms, marked with a different icon. This article covers joining and using one as a member. If you're setting up voice and video on a relay you run, see Enabling Voice and Video Calls on Your Relay instead. And if you just want the bigger picture of how Rooms fit into a Space, see Spaces and Rooms Explained.

Finding Messages and Recent Activity

A busy space can outpace you fast — a dozen rooms, a handful of threads, maybe a poll or two, all moving at once. Flotilla gives you two tools for keeping up and digging back through it all: Recent Activity, a feed that gathers everything new in one place, and Search Content, a dialog for finding something specific you remember seeing.

Notifications and Muting

By default, Flotilla notifies you about activity in every space and room you belong to. That's fine for a quiet space, but once you're in a handful of active communities, it's worth tuning things down to just what you care about. Flotilla gives you three separate levers: which rooms and spaces can ping you, which kinds of activity count as a notification, and who you'd rather not hear from at all.

Featured Content and the Library

Chat moves fast. Even the best-organized rooms bury useful things under new messages within a day. Flotilla gives organizers two tools built to fight that: Featured Content, which surfaces a handful of important items on your space's About page, and the Library, a searchable collection of pinned links and events that sticks around indefinitely. Neither replaces chat. They sit alongside it as the "start here" and "keep this handy" layers of your space.

Zaps and Your Wallet

A "zap" is a Lightning payment — a tip in sats (satoshis, fractions of a bitcoin) that you send straight to someone in response to something they posted. Zaps are a core way Nostr communities show appreciation: instead of just reacting with an emoji, you back it up with real value. You can zap a message in a room, a thread, a calendar event, or a fundraising goal.

Customizing How Flotilla Looks and Feels

Flotilla has a handful of display and reading-comfort settings that are easy to miss, because they live in two different places: a quick toggle in the settings menu, and a fuller set of controls on the Content settings page. This article covers both.

Running a community

3 articles

Running a Community

Running a community is a commitment to people, not just to a place for conversation. Healthy communities make it easier for members to connect, collaborate, and support each other in real life as well as online.

Managing a Space

Flotilla includes a range of features built to help community organizers manage membership, moderate content, and control access.

Controlling Who Can Join Your Space

A new space starts locked down. Until you say otherwise, only the people you invite or add can read or post in it. Opening it up, or deciding exactly how people get in, touches all three parts of the Flotilla stack. This article walks through each one from the space owner's side.

Hosting your space

8 articles

Hosting Your Space with Coracle

Flotilla is the app your community uses; it doesn't host the community itself. Your space lives on a Nostr relay, and that relay has to run somewhere. This article covers what that means and how to get a relay — with a hosting provider or by running one yourself.

The Platform Plan

The Platform plan is Flotilla's top tier, for organizations that want a community platform that's entirely their own — carrying their name and brand, not ours — without having to build or run any of it. We create it, host it, and maintain it; you get a finished product and a team behind it. It includes everything in the other plans, and it's priced per engagement rather than off a list.

Billing and Payments for Your Hosted Space

If you pay for a hosted relay, billing lives on the hosting side, not in Flotilla. The details below apply to Coracle Hosting; the panel has its own documentation, but here's what's worth knowing before you rely on a paid space. If you haven't set one up yet, start with Hosting Your Space with Coracle.

Using a Custom Domain for Your Hosted Space

A hosted space comes with a default subdomain like myspace.spaces.coracle.social, which works fine on its own. If you'd rather your community lived at your own address — chat.mycommunity.com, say — you can point that domain at your hosted relay. You set this up on the hosting side, since it's a property of the relay rather than the chat app, but the mechanics that matter are all in DNS.

Self Hosting a Space

Nostr identifies users with cryptographic identities, and one of the great things about them is that they reduce your exposure to deplatforming: your social identity can't be taken away from you. Keep a backup of your events and you're also safe from losing your content and social graph. But there's no getting around the fact that someone has to run the servers.

Setting Up Media Storage on Your Relay (Blossom)

When someone uploads an image or file in Flotilla, it isn't stored as a regular Nostr event. It's handled by Blossom, a protocol for hosting binary media alongside a relay. On a self-hosted zooid relay, Blossom is off by default. If you followed the self-hosting walkthrough, its sample config already sets [blossom].enabled = true. This article explains what that turns on, and the choices hiding underneath it.

Enabling Voice and Video Calls on Your Relay (LiveKit)

Flotilla supports voice rooms and video calls with screen sharing, but you have to configure the relay before members ever see the option. This article is for relay operators — people self-hosting zooid, and anyone who wants to understand what happens behind a hosted relay's feature toggles. If you just want to use voice and video as a member, see Spaces and Rooms Explained instead.

Backing Up and Upgrading Your Self-Hosted Relay

If you followed Self Hosting a Space to stand up your own zooid relay, keeping it backed up and up to date is now your job. zooid does neither automatically, and mistakes here can genuinely hurt: lose the wrong file and your relay changes identity; copy the wrong file at the wrong moment and you get a corrupt database. This article covers both, specifically for zooid.

Privacy, cost & account

4 articles

Is Flotilla Private?

Digital privacy matters a great deal, and it's also complicated. Calling something "private" can mean different things to different people — anything from "trust me bro" to full end-to-end encrypted communication.

Privacy Settings: Limiting What You Leak

Is Flotilla Private? covers what "private" means for your published content and messages. This is the practical follow-up: the controls in Flotilla that keep you from leaking to relays and third parties without meaning to.

Can I Delete My Account or Data?

Wanting to delete your account is normal, but on Nostr the honest answer is more complicated than a button. There's no platform account behind your Flotilla identity — see Understanding Your Nostr Identity for what your key actually is. So there's nothing for Flotilla, or anyone else, to close, suspend, or erase on your behalf. What Flotilla can do is delete the content you've published and ask relays to stop serving it. Here's exactly what that does and doesn't accomplish.

Is Flotilla Free?

Yes. Using Flotilla — on the web, as a PWA, on Android, or on iOS — is completely free, and so is joining and taking part in communities. There's no subscription, no premium tier, and nothing in the app locked behind a payment.

Help & community

1 article

Community and Support

We're glad you're here. Whether you're looking for help or just want to talk with other community organizers, come join us in our community chat.