Coracle Chat brings together the best parts of coracle.social and flotilla.social in a single platform. Participate in conversations across multiple chat groups, discuss articles, and plan in-person events. Coracle.chat is a community-oriented social media platform which helps contributes to communities instead of extracting value from them.

Coracle Chat is built on the nostr protocol, which leverages signed data and aligned storage to protect user sovereignty. Instead of using email and passwords, users are identified using a cryptographic keypair, which allows them to maintain a single identity across multiple contexts, avoid deplatforming, and credibly exit any platform.

Communities are led; leaders are responsible for the healthy functioning of the community on the social level, as well as for providing aligned infrastructure. Coracle Chat allows leaders to white-label the application for greater control over branding and user experience.

Social media is full of dark patterns which tend to detract from in-person relationships. Community can only be achieved in person. Coracle does not advertise to users, harvest user data, or optimize for user engagement. Coracle does provide users tools which allow them to be as digitally engaged with members of their community as desired, including push notifications, email digests, chat rooms, shared calendars, microblogging and long-form articles, feed creation and curation, moderation tools, privacy controls, and dashboards with summaries of activity.

Revealed preference in an age of big data is increasingly for the "cozy" web, spaces that are open only to people with shared values or context. Chat rooms with a small number of members (2-20 people) are the purest embodiment of this, since all members are sufficiently trusted and engaged for chat messages to be neither an opportunity for over-sharing, not a nuisance.

Larger communities (up to several thousand people) might find utility in a shared contact list, event calendar, or a place for leadership or member announcements, but would be too large for chat. In this context, read-protected, unlisted long-lived or one-off chat groups can be useful for subsets of community membership to particpate in.

Finally, a given user might be a member of multiple unrelated or loosely-related communities, including the nostr network itself. Users may be public figures with a following across multiple communities (that he may or may not be himself a member of). Supporting broadcast content (microblogging, long-form content, video, audio, etc) allows for the curation of a digital identity and mediated interaction between communities. These public posts may then be pulled into a more private context for discussion.

In all of this, the point is not to drive engagement for its own sake. Success is a function of community health.

Coracle cultivates:

• Conversations that are public enough to include interested parties, but private enough to discourage self-censorship
• Thoughtful, slow-paced interactions rather than rapid fire or wall-of-text arguments
• The ability to workshop ideas in private, then broadcast good ones publicly
• Prioritization of in-person activity rather than a digital abstraction of it

Coracle discourages:

• Exclusive or excessive interaction in digital spaces
• The objectification of people through the lens of "content"
• Social media addiction, and an entertainment mentality

[user-oriented resources]