Announcing #Squalk

Personally, I’m not a fan of real-time communication at all costs; I believe that an asynchronous approach based on more in-depth content is often more effective and healthy. So why not breathe new life into good old-fashioned forums? They seem like the perfect solution and I really don’t understand why something like this didn’t already exist on Nostr, so I created it!



The basic idea behind Squalk is to offer a tool through which anyone can build their own community, where the main focus is on thoughtful discussion.
Each forum includes a chat feature in the right-hand sidebar, which is useful for quickly interacting with other users in spontaneous and temporary discussions, thus combining the best of both worlds.



Squalk supports both single-room and multi-room setups.
It’s also possible to add resources in the form of articles and customize specific pages (homepage, contact page) to offer a unique and distinctive experience to your users.

You can format and tag your posts, and there’s full support for quoting.





Squalk is based on NIP-29 and NIP-7D, with some minor implementations that are fully backward-compatible. I’m also exploring how to extend NIP-29 for better permission management, so that various types of groups can be created.
After refining these parts, I will add an admin interface for the admins.

You can play it here: https://squalk-test.dtonon.com

Source code and setup details are available at https://github.com/dtonon/squalk

Have fun and let me know what you think! :)