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 takes more thought. This guide covers starting, hosting, growing, and moderating a community you actually own, in plain language, with no prior knowledge assumed.

Read guide

Guide

What Is Nostr? A Plain-English Guide

You've probably run into the word "Nostr" and bounced straight off a wall of jargon. Here's what Nostr is in plain English, why people care about it, and how it lets you own your identity and your community online.

Read guide

Getting started

6 articles

What is Flotilla?

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

Getting Started

To get started, visit app.flotilla.social. You'll see 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 is a Nostr client, so the only thing you need to bring is your key (see Understanding Your Nostr Identity). You can run it in a browser tab, install it on your home screen, or download the native Android or iOS app.

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). The login screen offers several ways to bring that key in, and they aren't equally safe.

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.

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.

Comparisons

4 articles

Flotilla as a Slack Alternative

If you are looking for an alternative to Slack, the first question is what you are running. Slack is workplace software, 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. Flotilla is the Slack alternative for that second group, organizers who want to own the community they build rather than rent it per seat.

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 want to move somewhere else one day, this article is for you. It compares Discord and Flotilla for organizers looking for an alternative where the community, the history, and the members are yours.

Flotilla: A Telegram Alternative for Community Owners

Telegram is excellent at some things. If you run a community there and want structure, moderation, and a community you own, 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.

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. Each entry below gives the short answer, 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 covers what that key is, how to back it up, and how to get back into your account later.

Using Flotilla

9 articles

Spaces and Rooms Explained

If you're coming from Discord or Slack, Flotilla will feel familiar fast, though a couple of the underlying concepts work differently. 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 will be spent in "rooms" — the channels described in Spaces and Rooms Explained.

Direct Messages

Direct messages (DMs) are 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, with live audio, video, and screen sharing available once you're in. They sit in the sidebar alongside the text Rooms, marked with a different icon. If you're setting up voice and video on a relay you run, see Enabling Voice and Video Calls on Your Relay instead. For how Rooms fit into a Space, see Spaces and Rooms Explained.

Finding Messages and Recent Activity

Flotilla gives you two tools for keeping up with a busy space and digging back through it: 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. You can tune that in three places: 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 for 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.

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. You can zap a message in a room, a thread, a calendar event, or a fundraising goal.

Customizing How Flotilla Looks and Feels

Flotilla's display and reading-comfort settings are all on Settings → Content, which you can open from the Content tile in the settings menu or the Content item in the settings sidebar. The page has four sections:

Running a community

3 articles

Running a Community

Running a community is a commitment to people. 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 gives community organizers tools to manage membership, moderate content, and control access.

Controlling Who Can Join Your Space

When a space's relay has no access policy set, nobody but the owner can read or write content until they're invited. That holds whether your space runs on a freshly self-hosted zooid relay or one hosted by Flotilla.

Hosting your space

8 articles

Hosting Your Space with Flotilla

Every space lives on a relay, and that relay has to run somewhere. Flotilla can run it for you. Creating the space, changing its settings and paying for it all happen in the app, alongside the space itself. If you'd rather run the server yourself, see Self Hosting a Space.

The Platform Plan

The Platform plan is Flotilla's top tier, for organizations that want a community platform carrying their own name and brand without having to build or run any of it. We create it, host it, and maintain 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 relay Flotilla hosts, billing lives in the app, under Settings → Hosting. If you haven't set up a hosted space yet, start with Hosting Your Space with Flotilla.

Using a Custom Domain for Your Hosted Space

A hosted space comes with a default domain controlled by Flotilla - for example, myspace.spaces.flotilla.social. This works fine, but isn't the most aesthetic thing to share with your community members. Using our domain also increases your level of lock-in.

Self Hosting a Space

Nostr identifies users with cryptographic identities, so your social identity can't be taken away from you. Keep a backup of your events and you're safe from losing your content and social graph too. But someone still has to run the servers.

Setting Up Media Storage on Your Relay (Blossom)

An image or file uploaded in Flotilla 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, though the sample config in the self-hosting walkthrough already sets [blossom].enabled = true.

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 see the option. This article is for relay operators self-hosting zooid. 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 running is now your job. Running a relay isn't a lot of work, but occasional maintenance is necessary to keep things functioning smoothly.

Privacy, cost & account

4 articles

Is Flotilla Private?

Calling something "private" can mean different things to different people, anything from "trust me bro" to full end-to-end encrypted communication. Flotilla covers two main areas where the requirements and guarantees differ: community spaces and direct messages.

Privacy Settings: Limiting What You Leak

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

Can I Delete My Account or Data?

Flotilla doesn't own the infrastructure your spaces run on. Instead, each space lives on a server its community controls, and your identity is a key you hold rather than an account Flotilla issues. That cuts both ways - nobody can shut down your community or lock you out of your identity, but there's also no single company that can close your account and erase everything you've posted.

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 and no premium tier.

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.