Notifications and Muting

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

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.

Per-room and per-space notifications

Every space has a header menu — tap the space name at the top of its room list — with a “Turn on/off notifications” option that flips alerts for the whole space at once. When a space is off, you can still keep a room or two notifying you; when it’s on, you can silence the one noisy room that’s drowning out everything else. Either way, the rest of the space keeps whatever setting it already had.

For a single room, open it and click the info icon at the top of the screen to see its details. Under “Room Settings” you’ll find a Notifications toggle for that room specifically. It’s the same per-room control that joining a space points you to right after you first join.

This preference isn’t just stored on your phone. It’s saved as an encrypted event published to your own relays, tied to your Nostr identity. Log into Flotilla on another device with the same key, and your per-space and per-room notification choices come with you.

Choosing what counts as a notification

Head to Settings → Alerts for the broader controls. Here you can turn on:

• A badge showing your unread count on the app icon
• A notification sound for new activity (this option only appears in the web app — the native Android and iOS apps use your phone’s own sound settings)
• Push notifications, delivered to your device even when Flotilla isn’t open

Below that, “Alert Types” lets you choose what triggers a notification: general activity in a space, being directly mentioned, or new direct messages. These alert settings are stored on the device you set them on, so if you use Flotilla on both your phone and a laptop, check them in both places.

Favoriting a room

That same room info panel has a Favorite toggle next to the notification one. Favoriting a room bookmarks it, keeping it near the top of your room list instead of buried under everything else in the space — handy for the couple of rooms you check every day.

Muting accounts

If the problem is a specific person rather than a specific room, go to Settings → Content and add them under Muted Accounts. Once someone is muted, their messages collapse wherever you’d otherwise see them, replaced by a note that you’ve muted this person and a “Show anyway” link in case you change your mind for a particular message. Muting doesn’t remove you from a room or space, and it doesn’t notify the other person. It just keeps their content out of your way.

If it’s a room that’s too noisy rather than a person, you don’t need to mute anything. Just turn off that room’s notifications from its info panel, as described above, or leave its member list from the room menu if you want out entirely.

Where these controls live

To recap:

• Room info panel (info icon inside a room) — per-room notifications, favoriting
• Space menu (tap the space name) — notifications for the whole space
• Settings → Alerts — badges, sound, push, and which activity types notify you
• Settings → Content — muted accounts

Between these, you can dial a busy space down to just the mentions and rooms you care about, or keep everything on and simply mute the people you’d rather not hear from.