Spaces and Rooms Explained
Part of our guide to running an online community you actually own.
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.
Term Map: Discord/Slack → Flotilla
Here’s the quick version:
| Discord / Slack | Flotilla |
|---|---|
| Server | Space — a community |
| Channel | Room — text or voice |
| Your account / login | Your Nostr key (npub) — you own it, Flotilla doesn’t issue it. See Understanding Your Nostr Identity. |
| DMs | DMs — same idea, kept separate from any Space |
| Roles (permission bundles) | Roles, but cosmetic ones: color-coded member labels, not permission bundles. Access is controlled at the Room and relay level instead. See Managing a Space. |
| Voice/video channels | Voice Rooms and video calls, if that Space’s relay supports them — not every Space has them |
| ”Someone runs the server” | Anyone can host a Space: self-host zooid, or use a managed plan like Coracle Hosting |
A Space Is a Community, Flotilla Is the App
A Space is a community — the people, the conversation, the shared stuff you’re there for. Flotilla is just the app you use to reach it. This distinction matters more on Nostr than on other platforms: a Space doesn’t run on Flotilla’s servers, because Flotilla has none. It lives on a Nostr relay, a server run by someone — the community’s organizer — whether that’s a self-hosted zooid relay or a plan on Coracle Hosting.
So the Space and the app are two separate things that happen to work together. If a Space’s organizer moved the community to a different relay, or you opened the same Space in a different Nostr client entirely, the community itself wouldn’t change — only your window into it would. See What is Flotilla? for more on why that separation is the whole point.
Rooms Are the Channels
Inside a Space, conversation happens in Rooms — the direct equivalent of Discord or Slack channels. A Space can have as many Rooms as its organizer sets up, each with its own name, icon, and purpose: #general, #random, #support, whatever fits the community.
Most Rooms are text chat, but a Space can also offer voice Rooms for live audio — plus video calls with screen sharing — if the relay behind it is configured to support them. Joining a Room works the way you’d expect: click it in the sidebar and start reading or talking. For the details on posting, reacting, and everything else that happens inside a Room day to day, see Chatting in a Space.
A Space Is More Than Chat
Rooms cover real-time conversation, but a Space can hold much more:
- Threads — a forum-style board: you start a post, and others reply with comments beneath it, for discussion meant to outlast a fast-moving chat scroll. Threads can be organized into per-room boards. Who can see and post to them is governed by the Space’s access settings, not a separate thread-level permission.
- Calendar — scheduled events the community is running.
- Library — a curated collection of pinned links and posts worth keeping around (see Featured Content and the Library).
- Polls — quick votes on a question.
- Classifieds — a marketplace-style listings board.
- Goals — fundraising targets members can zap sats toward.
- Member directory — a searchable list of everyone in the Space, including any roles they’ve been assigned.
- Recent Activity — a feed that pulls together new activity across the Space’s Rooms and other content types, so you can catch up in one place. See Finding Messages and Recent Activity.
Which of these a Space actually uses is up to its organizer — some communities lean entirely on chat, others use threads and the calendar heavily. Whatever’s turned on lives in the same sidebar navigation as the Space’s Rooms.
Direct Messages Aren’t Part of a Space
It’s easy to assume DMs are just a private Room, but they aren’t. Direct messages live in their own section of Flotilla, outside of any Space. You can message anyone whether or not you share a Space with them, and DMs are end-to-end encrypted (NIP-17) rather than visible to a relay operator the way Room messages are. See Direct Messages for how to start one, and Is Flotilla Private? for exactly what that encryption does and doesn’t protect against.
One Identity, Many Spaces
Because your Nostr key is your identity rather than a per-platform account, joining a new Space doesn’t mean creating a new profile or a new login. The same key gets you into every Space you belong to, and switching between them is one click in the sidebar. Your profile, your key, and your DMs travel with you no matter how many Spaces you’re part of. Once this clicks, Joining a Space is the natural next step.