Controlling Who Can Join Your Space

Part of our guide to running an online community you actually own.

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.

Invite-only by default

When a space’s relay has no access policy set, it is fully closed: nobody but the owner can read or write until they’re invited. That holds whether your space runs on a freshly self-hosted zooid relay or one provisioned through Coracle Hosting. A space never opens itself up by accident. When you’re getting your first members in, this is exactly what you want, because it keeps the space private until you decide otherwise.

Invite links are reusable, not single-use

The easiest way to bring someone in is an invite link. From a space’s main menu, click “Create Invite” to generate a link, plus an invite code if your relay supports it, that you can copy, share, or show as a QR code. Whoever opens it is walked through login or onboarding and then offered the chance to join your space.

Here is the one thing to understand about invites: an invite link or code is reusable, not single-use. Redeeming it doesn’t consume it or invalidate it for anyone else. The same link keeps working for whoever holds it, indefinitely, until you revoke it. So an invite link behaves like a shared secret, not a one-time ticket. Anyone who receives it can join, and anyone who receives it can pass it to someone you never meant to invite. Only share a link with people you actually want in your space. If one leaks, treat it as a real access problem and revoke it, rather than assuming it “already got used.”

If a space is invite-only and you don’t have a link, contact the space’s moderator directly and ask for one. Flotilla’s discovery page can point you to a space, but getting in still takes an invite from someone with admin access.

Adding members directly

Instead of invite links, or alongside them, an admin can add a member directly by their Nostr public key. This lives in the same members panel you use to view your membership and manage bans — see Managing a Space for the full membership and moderation workflow. Adding someone by pubkey is handy when you already know exactly who you want in and don’t need them to go through the invite-link flow.

Opening your space up

Making a space fully or partially public, so people don’t need an invite at all, isn’t something you toggle from inside Flotilla’s chat interface. It’s an access-policy setting on the relay itself, and where you change it depends on how your space is hosted.

On Coracle Hosting, open your relay’s page in the hosting dashboard and look at its access policy toggles: public read (anyone can read without joining), public write (anyone can post without joining), and public join (anyone can join without an invite at all). Flip only the ones you want. For most communities, public read with everything else off is a reasonable “come see what we’re about” middle ground.

On a self-hosted zooid relay, the same settings live in the [policy] block of your relay’s config file: public_read, public_write, and public_join, all of which default to false. Turning on public_join lets anyone self-join without ever going through an invite — see Self Hosting a Space for how to edit and reload that config.

Either way, public_join is the setting that matters most here: it’s the difference between “invite-only” and “open to anyone who finds the link.”

Note that the hosting dashboard has no members list to approve, reject, or invite people from. It only shows a live member count against your plan’s cap. Invites, adding by pubkey, and bans all happen in Flotilla against the relay; the dashboard, or your zooid config, only controls the policy that decides whether an invite is required in the first place.

Removing someone

Controlling who gets in is only half the picture. Getting someone back out after they’ve joined is a separate action — a ban, not an un-invite — and it’s covered along with reports and room-level permissions in Managing a Space.