Featured Content and the Library

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

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.

Featured Content

Every space has an About page — the same place members land when they open the space’s information panel to read its name, description, and icon. Featured Content lets admins highlight specific items there, such as key messages, threads, or events. It’s the difference between a new member scrolling back through weeks of chat to find your welcome message or community guidelines and simply seeing them the moment they open the space.

Editing Featured Content is part of the same space-editing surface covered in Managing a Space: your relay needs to support Nostr’s relay management API, and you need admin permission on the space. Without both, the option to feature content won’t appear. Once you have access, you edit featured items from the same flow you’d use to update your space’s name, description, or icon.

Think of Featured Content as curation for first impressions — a small, deliberate set of items, not a running log. If you want to highlight more than a few things, or build a browsable set of resources rather than a handful of pinned highlights, that’s what the Library is for.

The Library

The Library (you may also see it called “shelves” or a pinboard) is a per-space collection of pinned links and events, shown as a searchable, masonry-style gallery rather than a chronological feed. Where Featured Content is a small highlight reel on the About page, the Library holds anything durable enough to keep around and search back through later — reference links, external resources, recurring events, guides, or anything else your members might want to find again without scrolling through chat or digging through threads.

That distinction is the useful way to picture a space’s content surfaces together: chat rooms carry the real-time conversation, threads hold longer-form discussion, and the Library is where you deliberately set things aside so they don’t get lost in either.

Who can add or pin items to a given space’s Library depends on how that space and its relay are configured. Treat it as an organizer-facing curation tool for now, and check your own space’s permissions if you’re unsure whether you have access to add to it.

Using both together

Neither feature requires special setup beyond the space itself. When you’re setting up a new community, a natural pattern is to feature your welcome message or community guidelines so every new member sees them first, then use the Library to collect the reference material — rules documents, external links, recurring event details — that members will want to return to. Both are optional, and a space works fine without either, but together they go a long way toward making a growing space feel navigable instead of like an endless scroll.

If you’re still setting up your space’s basic details, roles, or permissions, start with Managing a Space. Featured Content and the Library are best thought of as finishing touches once the core of your space is in place.