Communities
End-to-End Encrypted Communities
Your Community, Your Rules. Battle-Tested & Censorship-Resistant.
Communities are the heart of not only the Vector experience, but of any group of like-minded individuals with a shared purpose, goals, and interests, both online and offline. Vector brings that meaningful experience online in an open-source, decentralized, and privacy-preserving manner through the integration of Concord Protocol (Concord means harmony, peace, or agreement between people). Through Vector Communities, people can create, discover, and share their hobbies, interests, and perspectives in a fun, immersive, and expressive manner by chatting, sharing media, playing games together, and more.
Join the Official Vector Community on Vector, here.
Group Chat vs Community
The terms are somewhat subjective, but there is a clear technical distinction between the two. Group Chats are typically private with fewer members and contain a single channel. Communities can create as many channels and sections as they need, and become public once a public invite link is created. In practice, a Group Chat is a smaller, more minimal version of a Community. Both the creator and any admin can create invite links, which can be shared across the web or submitted to the Vector Hub to help grow the Community.
Learn more about Group Chats
Creating a Community
Creating a Community takes seconds. From the Chat Menu (bottom navigation bar), select the create button and give your Community a name. A description and avatar are optional and can be added or changed at any time.
You can also select contacts during creation to send them a direct invite once the Community is ready. This step is optional, a name is all that is required to get started.
Joining a Community
There are three ways to join a Vector Community:
Anyone holding the link can join. Links can be shared anywhere on the web, or posted directly in Vector where they render as an embedded card with a Join button.
Only the owner or an admin can create these links, and any of them can revoke a link at any time.
The owner or an admin invites your npub directly. The invite arrives as a pending request that you can accept or decline.
This method works even when a Community is private, since it does not require a public link to exist.
Browse listed Communities by category on the Vector Hub and join directly from the directory.
Only Communities that have opted in and been approved appear here.
Pinned Messages
Pin the messages that matter in a channel so they stay visible to everyone. Useful for rules, announcements, or anything new members should see first. To enable the Pin Menu dropdown, simply click the pin icon in the top menu bar. Clicking on a a pin will jump directly to that message in the chat log. Remove pins by clicking the icon on the right side. Communities support up to 25 pinned messages, or 32KB of total pin data, whichever limit is reached first.
Bots & Slash Commands
Communities support bots through slash commands, the same / convention used across Slack, Discord, and Telegram. A structured composer lets bots offer real commands with typed parameters. Type /, pick a bot, and fill in the fields.
Bots carry a bot icon beside their name so they are always distinguishable from human members.
Developers can build their own bots with the Vector SDK.
Always verify a bot's npub character by character before inviting it. Anyone can create a Nostr identity with a matching display name and avatar, and a moderation bot holds real permissions in your Community.
Roles & Permissions
Authority in a Vector Community is not a database flag. It is a signed roster rooted in the owner's identity, which every member's client verifies independently.
Owner
Full control, including deleting the Community. Cannot be removed.
Admin
Manage members, messages, roles, invites, and Community settings.
Member
Participate in channels according to channel permissions.
Owners and admins appear with a crown beside their name in the member list: gold for the owner, green for admins as of v0.4.4.
Invites
Both the owner and any admin can create invite links, which can be shared across the web or submitted to the Vector Hub to help grow the Community.
Labeled Links
When creating a link, you can give it a name or tag visible only to you and other admins. This serves as a tracking tool for onboarding, letting you see which links brought in the most members. Admins can view each link's join count directly in the invite panel.
Revoking
Revoking a link stops new members from joining through it. Existing members are unaffected unless the revoked link was the last one, which returns the Community to private and triggers a re-key.
Moderation
Vector Communities include a full moderation system built around ranked, owner-rooted roles. Owners can appoint admins and moderators, each carrying granular permissions that every client validates independently rather than trusting a server to enforce. Moderators can remove messages, kick members, and issue bans, with each action published as a signed Concord event that any member can verify for themselves. Because authority traces back to the owner's key rather than a database flag, a forged moderation action simply fails to validate and is dropped.
Bans in Vector are cryptographic rather than cosmetic. Removing a member re-keys the community, so they lose the ability to read anything published after their removal, not just their ability to post. This is the difference between a platform saying someone has been removed and a protocol making it true.
Built-In Tools
Vector gives owners and admins a full moderation toolkit, with one important difference from other platforms: removals are cryptographic, not cosmetic.
To moderate, open the Community profile by selecting the Community name in the top navigation bar. You will see the full member list, along with a search bar to locate specific members.
Kick
Removes the member. They can rejoin with a new invite.
Ban
Removes the member and re-keys the Community, locking them out of everything published afterward.
Delete Message
Removes a message from the channel for everyone.
Sentire-001
Sentire-001 is Vector's first moderation bot, built for Communities that have grown past what a handful of volunteers can watch by hand. It screens messages as they arrive, judges images and video through a vision model you choose, and tracks a single visible reputation score per member so moderators can see why someone sits where they do before acting. It also recognizes coordinated raids by their shape rather than their content, containing an entire wave in one pass instead of racing it ban by ban. Crucially, Sentire runs on your infrastructure with your policies and your chosen model, so nothing about your Community leaves it, and every action it takes is a signed event any member can verify. Add Sentire-001 to Your Community:
To learn more about Sentire-001, visit the official GitHub.
Deleting a Community
Deleting a Community is permanent and cannot be undone. Only the owner can do this.
As a safeguard against accidental deletion, you will be asked to type the Community's exact name to confirm. Once deleted, no new messages can be sent and no one can rejoin, though members can still delete their own past messages.
There is no recovery or backup. Vector has no ability to restore a deleted Community, because there is no server holding a copy of it. Only the owner has full rights and permission.
Vector Hub
The Vector Hub is a platform where communities can apply and have their communities listed so they are easier to discover and grow more easily. In order to apply, creators need to make a public invite link and use that to apply on the website, as well as picking a tag to help define the category of the Community.
Grow Your Community
Get your Vector Community more visibility and members by listing it on the Vector Hub, an open platform where anyone can discover both new and established Vector Communities. Each community is tagged with a category, making it easy to find through the filters near the top of the page. Categories include General, Privacy & Security, Technology, Bitcoin & Crypto, Art & Creative, Gaming, and more.
Submit Your Community
The Vector Hub is a centralized platform that manually approves communities before listing them publicly, which means there is a general criteria to follow. However, this only affects visibility on the Vector Hub website. Ultimately it is your community and your rules, and nobody can censor or shut it down. Vector has no power to remove or delete a community, only to approve or deny whether it appears in the public directory.
Listing Guidelines
The Listing Guidelines are straightforward and consistent with what you would find on most other websites and platforms. Communities that break these guidelines are subject to removal from the Vector Hub listing, though as noted above, this only affects public visibility and does not remove or delete the community itself.
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