The future is relay-based groups
Obelisk today is a centralized server with Nostr login. The plan is to retire the centralized server and become a pure Nostr client on top of NIP-29 relay-managed groups, NIP-28 public channels, and NIP-59 gift-wrapped private groups.
Where we are
Today, Obelisk is a hybrid: Nostr owns your identity, a single server owns the chat data. That's a pragmatic choice — it lets us ship Discord-grade UX (threads, reactions, moderation, voice, search) right now, because doing all of that purely on Nostr is still hard in 2026.
But the centralized piece is a scar. It means:
- If the instance you're on shuts down, your server's history is gone.
- Moderation decisions are local to one operator.
- Communities can't easily fork, mirror, or migrate.
So the long-term plan is to peel the centralized server back and push as much as possible onto Nostr itself.
What replaces the server
Three complementary Nostr specs cover the ground we need:
NIP-29 — relay-managed groups
The most promising path. In NIP-29, the relay is the group. The relay tracks members, roles, and admin actions; clients publish kind 9 chat events and kind 11 threads scoped to a group id; the relay enforces who can write. Effectively, every relay that speaks NIP-29 is a little Discord server — portable, self-hostable, interoperable.
This is the closest analog to what Obelisk does today, just with the relay playing the role of "the server."
NIP-28 — public chat channels
Lighter-weight. Kind 40 creates a channel, kind 42 is a message in it. Totally open, no membership management. Great for public lobbies and town squares; not appropriate for curated communities because anyone can post and there's no built-in moderation. Obelisk will support NIP-28 for public, discoverable channels (think: the front door of a server) while NIP-29 handles the members-only rooms.
NIP-59 — gift-wrapped private groups
For small, private, end-to-end encrypted groups (your family, a DAO's internal working group), NIP-59 "gift wraps" let you deliver group messages through public relays without the relays seeing who's in the group or what they said. Slower and heavier, but strongly private.
What Obelisk keeps doing
Even in the fully-decentralized future, Obelisk still exists as:
- A polished client — Discord-grade UX, La Crypta design, reactions, threads, voice.
- A moderation layer — clients enforce local rules on top of whatever the relay permits: muting noisy senders, hiding low-trust posts (WoT), promoting Nostr NIP-05 verified users.
- An identity bridge — profile caching, NIP-46 bunker support, NIP-07 extension flows.
- A voice relay (for now) — WebRTC group voice over a signaling server is still the least-bad option until a Nostr-native voice spec matures.
The migration shape
We're not going to flip a switch. The plan is gradual:
- Stage 1 — Nostr profile everywhere (done). Every user in Obelisk has a real Nostr identity, profile, and relay list.
- Stage 2 — NIP-28 public channels (soon). Open, discoverable lobbies as a first-class feature, stored on Nostr.
- Stage 3 — NIP-29 private servers (mid-term). New servers default to a NIP-29 relay backend. The existing Postgres path stays for legacy instances.
- Stage 4 — NIP-59 encrypted groups (mid-term). Private DMs and small groups move to gift-wrap.
- Stage 5 — retire Postgres (long-term). Once feature parity is there, the centralized database becomes optional.
What it means for you
- Your identity is already portable. The day we flip a server to NIP-29, your account comes with you automatically. Nothing to export.
- Community history can mirror. NIP-29 groups can be mirrored across multiple relays, so losing one relay doesn't lose the group.
- You pick your relay. Communities get to pick a relay the way they pick a Matrix homeserver or a Mastodon instance today — but cheaper, lighter, and interoperable.
- Moderation stays local. Even on a shared relay, each community (and each client, like Obelisk) applies its own filters. WoT stays on our side; bad actors get filtered before you see them.