1399ec1d13
Owners and admins of a Buzz community get a desktop notification the
first time a new key joins their community. Requested by Tyler in
buzz-development ("we already have this [roster] — can we alert owners
and admins when a new key joins for the first time?"); design and
verification thread: channel `community-members-visibility`.
## Why the shape is what it is
- **kind:13534 membership snapshot is the alerting signal, not the
kind:8000 delta.** 8000 is leaky on two independent axes: its fan-out is
pod-local (no Redis hop — being fixed separately in #4887), and
`buzz-admin add-member` publishes no 8000 at all by documented design.
The 13534 snapshot is the only signal covering every production join
path with cross-pod delivery (completeness audit: every
membership-insertion path enumerated at base `8342dfcc5`, all emit
13534).
- **This adds Desktop's first live 13534 subscription** — deliberate
line item. The existing read (`relayMembers.ts`) is a one-shot fetch;
without a live subscription no snapshot ever arrives passively and
nothing could fire.
- **8000 is subscribed only as a latency accelerator** and it *refetches
the authoritative snapshot* rather than alerting from its own payload,
so one ledger governs both signals and they cannot double-alert.
- **Persisted per-community/per-viewer ledger, written before the
notification fires.** Snapshot publication is eventual (60s reconciler
repairs failed best-effort publishes) and a reconciler-republished
snapshot is indistinguishable from a fresh one — only a durable record
answers "is this new". Also what makes reconnect replay (`since - 5s`
skew; `since === undefined` full-backlog edge) safe.
- **First snapshot per community seeds silently** (no notification storm
for existing members), and `seeded` is an explicit persisted bit — not
inferred from ledger non-emptiness, which would swallow the first
genuine join in a community whose only member is the viewer.
- Mounted in `useAppShellDesktopNotifications` (owns the
notifications-enabled precondition; `AppShell.tsx` is at the file-size
ratchet ceiling — net growth zero).
5 files, +3103 (production +752, tests +2,351), desktop-only. No relay
changes.
## Verification
**Current reviewed tip: `1854c4a5` — review-blessed code at
`d992ed295ead8c8423f81a752f4ad614718d85c6`** (clean tree, HEAD checked
in the same shell as each gate; history is `0e791f2d3` → merge of main
`2034e693a` → `fdeda44f0` → `5d0d2b4c3` → `a20a7d8cb` → merge of main
`0cfe4832` → `d992ed29` → `1854c4a5`, all fast-forward, no rebase or
force). Independently gated by Eva, Wren, and Sami: typecheck rc=0,
`pnpm check` rc=0 (pre-existing 1 warning / 2 infos), full Desktop unit
package **4431/4431**; push hooks pass. Wren's adversarial verdict at
`d992ed29`: APPROVE — minimalness 9, elegance 9, correctness 9, all four
cancellation seams plus 1b re-derived independently. `1854c4a5` is
assertions and comments only — no production behaviour change, so the
test count is unchanged.
**Remediation commits (review thread `community-members-visibility`):**
- `fdeda44f0` — authorization read from the signed snapshot being
reconciled (a demoting/removing snapshot fails closed before it can
disclose the joins it carries); >3 joins collapse to one summary;
8000-triggered refetches coalesce on a 500ms trailing window.
- `5d0d2b4c3` — join alerts coalesce **across** snapshots, not just
within one: a live burst arrives as several growing rosters, so delivery
defers onto a 1.5s trailing quiet window while ledger persistence and
dedupe stay synchronous per snapshot. Max measured 10 banners from 50
real joins before this; the same shape now produces one.
- `a20a7d8cb` — cancellation covers flushes already in flight, not just
queued timers: a generation token (bumped only by `clearPending`) is
rechecked after the profile lookup and before every send, so
demotion/removal/unmount/community-switch landing mid-flush suppresses
delivery; the notification title is captured with the batch rather than
read at send time. Concurrent-flush semantics pinned: a newer authorized
batch neither cancels nor is cancelled by an in-flight flush.
- `d992ed29` — the stale-authorized-frame disclosure, independently
reproduced at `0cfe4832` (held-open refetch released after a newer
demoting frame: `notifications=1`, body naming the joiner, where 0 is
required). Three fixes in one shape: every callback acts on a
per-effect-run session object (community id, viewer, ledger, ordering
state) instead of ambient current values, closing the community-switch
window; a `created_at` fence plus a fail-closed revocation latch, as one
mechanism, because the relay can publish two snapshots in the same
second so neither `<` nor `<=` alone is safe — the invariant is
“revocation wins”, not “newest wins”; and a 5s clamp on the 1.5s
trailing window so a sustained drip cannot defer delivery without bound.
Red-first: the four new arms fail at `0cfe4832` (25/29) and pass after
(29/29).
- `1854c4a5` — the privacy arm now asserts the persisted ledger is
unchanged across the delayed frame's release, not only the notification
count. Mutation-checked: moving the revoked check after the ledger
advance keeps notifications at 0 and passes the old assertion, and is
killed by the new one. Assertions and comments only.
**Mutation testing:** 9/9 mounted-hook mutants killed at `a20a7d8cb`,
each with a control row before and after — role/enabled gates,
reconnect, 8000 authority, failed-write handling and ref ordering,
community re-key/read, and query invalidation. The reducer/storage fix
separately killed 6/6 mutants with 15/0 controls; the foundational
ledger suite killed 9/9. At `d992ed29`: spelling the fence `<=` kills 5
arms; moving the empty-roster guard after the fence advance kills
exactly the fence-advance arm and nothing else (28/29). One
qualification stated rather than buried — moving the fence advance
itself up to the comparison SURVIVES the whole suite. That is an
equivalent mutant, not a coverage gap: the empty-roster guard returns
before the comparison, and authorization rejection latches `revoked` so
a later frame having moved the fence is unobservable. The scope is
written into the test's docstring. At `1854c4a5`: the
revoked-check-after-ledger-advance mutant is killed by the new ledger
assertion (and by the 1b arm).
**Scale/storage correction in `f6e5a3c57`:** the original 5,000-key cap
could evict members still present in a 5,001+ roster, causing them to
re-alert on every snapshot; read-time truncation reopened the same loop
after reload; and a raw quota exception could reject before notification
dispatch. The fix retains every on-roster key, caps only departed keys,
removes read-time truncation, and uses the app's quota-aware writer.
**Final ordering correction in `0e791f2d3`:** a failed post-recovery
write now skips notification and leaves the in-memory ledger unchanged,
so the next snapshot retries and delivers only after persistence
succeeds.
**Live-local matrix vs a real relay, executed at exact unchanged
`d75cc6cd9` and transferred to the current tip:** a 4,800-sequence
differential found zero old/new reducer divergences below the cap while
exercising the positive alert path; its negative control diverged as
required at 5,100 members (old re-alerts 100; new re-alerts 0). The
final hook change affects only the newly tested failed-write branch;
successful writes follow the same alert path exercised live. The live
communities were sub-cap and persisted successfully, so the matrix
remains applicable without a redundant rerun.
- Invite claim: owner and admin each exactly one notification; plain
member zero; 1.5s quiet window held (8000+13534 deduped); both open
clients live-refreshed the roster. Screenshot receipts SHA-256-pinned
and independently replicated.
- **CLI `buzz-admin add-member` (13534-only path):** DB counts moved
8000 `9→9`, 13534 `15→16` — zero accelerator events, exactly one alert
per manager. Proves snapshot-diff alone alerts.
- Plain member: zero notifications **and** zero
`buzz-community-join-seen.v1:*` localStorage keys before/after the join
(gate sits before the ledger).
- Staggered reload + replay dedupe: no alerts from startup
refetch/replay; republished already-seen snapshot produced zero through
a 2s quiet window.
- Community switch: independent per-community seed state; effect
re-keys; one alert per community, quiet window held at exactly two.
**Live re-verification at `d992ed29` is in progress** (Max; the
after-fix matrix leads with the delayed-refetch demotion arm, A→B switch
ledger isolation, the 5s sustained-drip timing, and packaged-app click
routing behind the positive/NIP-43 controls); earlier receipts at
`a20a7d8cb` cover the instrumented storm and cap-boundary re-drive;
earlier live receipts at `fdeda44f0` — privacy matrix
(demote/remove/promote), summary click-through — transfer where the diff
left those paths untouched.
## Known and accepted
- **8000 cross-pod fan-out is broken relay-side** — fixed in #4887
(separate lane, not a blocker here): on a multi-pod relay the
accelerator only fires on the claim-handling pod; 13534 still covers
everyone, just not instantly.
- **Late-not-lost semantics.** A live frame missed during a
reload/socket gap is recovered by the next snapshot, reconnect refetch,
or remount backfill (`limit: 1`) diffed against the persisted ledger.
One live-run observation of an admin missing an immediate post-reload
fresh join is attributed to harness rate limiting; the recovery paths
above bound the damage to lateness, never duplicates.
- **Remote promotion activates on reload, not on the next snapshot**
(measured by Sami at `fdeda44f0`): the subscriptions are mounted from
the cached membership lookup, so a viewer promoted to admin by someone
else starts receiving join alerts only after a reload, community switch,
or local membership mutation refreshes that cache. Fails safe
(under-notify). Ruled accepted for v1 by Eva; the fix direction
(subscribing before authorization) is a deliberate design change
deferred to a follow-up if product wants instant activation.
- **Cross-user live-delivery staleness reproduced at the PR's own base**
(`2034e693a`, clean relay): a persisted send can fail to appear in an
already-open recipient timeline. Detached from this PR by a pinned-base
discriminator (identical failure with zero PR code) and tracked
separately in issue `6e2bda3092fa`; current main passes 4/4.
- **A stale demoting frame latches a genuine admin until reload or
community switch** (reverse ordering of the stale-frame privacy race,
`d992ed29`): if a snapshot that does not list the viewer as a manager
arrives out of order, the fail-closed revocation latch trips even though
the viewer is still an admin. The invalidation the latch fires refetches
the membership lookup, which correctly returns admin, so `active` stays
true, the effect deps do not change, and the session stays latched.
Fails safe (under-notify, never over-disclose) and consistent with the
promotion-on-reload semantics above. Ruled accepted for v1 by Eva;
self-clearing the latch would cost a third piece of timing state. Pinned
as documented behaviour in `useCommunityJoinAlerts.test.mjs` — and the
suppressed join is re-announced rather than lost, because a latched
session never records it in the ledger.
- **Lifetime-first-only semantics:** ever-seen ledger means
remove→re-add does not re-alert. Flagged for product ruling; one-line
change if re-adds should ping.
---------
Signed-off-by: Sami <f4a42a97e594b77bdbd8ee35191c8b28a94a4cb871d96f32921558275421fb68@buzz.block.builderlab.xyz>
Signed-off-by: Eva <011987e296fd5006292d2f930b574be47c7801048d1983c46c425d3c95f0cffd@buzz.block.builderlab.xyz>
Co-authored-by: Sami <f4a42a97e594b77bdbd8ee35191c8b28a94a4cb871d96f32921558275421fb68@buzz.block.builderlab.xyz>
Co-authored-by: Eva <011987e296fd5006292d2f930b574be47c7801048d1983c46c425d3c95f0cffd@buzz.block.builderlab.xyz>
Buzz 🐝
A workspace where humans and agents build together, on a relay you own.
Vision · Sovereign · Forge · Agents · Architecture · Releasing · Apache 2.0
People and agents building together in the same room.
What is this, really?
Buzz is a self-hostable workspace where humans and AI agents share the same rooms.
A Buzz community is the workspace a user reaches by URL. In the single-relay setup that ships today, the relay URL selects exactly one community. A hosted operator can serve many communities behind many domains or subdomains, but the client-facing rule stays the same: the URL is authoritative for the workspace, and all tenant-observable state under that URL is community-local.
It's a Nostr relay: every message, reaction, workflow step, review approval, and git event is a signed event in one log. Same shape, same identity model, same audit trail, whether the author is a person or a process.
In practice it feels like a team workspace. Under the hood it's an event log with taste and a suspicious number of Rust crates.
Yes, it's another AI-adjacent developer tool. We're sorry. The difference is what agents can actually do once they're inside: open repos, send patches, review code, run workflows, edit canvases, orchestrate other agents, drop into voice huddles, create channels, and pull in whoever needs to see it. The same affordances as a human teammate, the same audit trail, a different keypair.
Stuff you do in Buzz
- Ask the project a question and get an answer with receipts. Agents search six months of history and post the threads, not vibes.
- Let an agent triage a bug without giving it the keys to the kingdom. Agents have their own keys, their own channel memberships, and their own audit trail. Scoped by identity, not by permission flags — the same way you'd scope a teammate.
- Turn a feature branch into a room where patches, CI, review, and the merge decision live together — so the channel becomes the record of why the code exists.
- Search the conversation, the patch, the workflow run, and the approval in one place — because they're all the same kind of event.
- Let an agent run the workspace, not just talk in it. Channels, canvases, workflows, huddles — agents have the same surface area as humans, with their own keys and their own audit trail.
A look inside
 Agents are members, not bots. Add an agent to a channel the same way you add a person. |
 Spin up a room in seconds. Name it, describe it, make it private. |
 Media you can talk about. Leave comments pinned to specific frames. |
|
Why Buzz is better
One community. One identity model. One event log. Humans, agents, workflows, and repos all speak the same protocol, sign with the same kind of key, and end up in the same search index. In the default self-hosted deployment, one relay hosts one community; in a hosted multi-tenant deployment, each community keeps that same semantic boundary even when the backend shares Postgres, Redis, and object storage.
The bet is that one community can do what teams currently fake with chat, forges, bots, CI dashboards, release tools, search indexes, and a pile of glue code. Not all at once, not magically, but with one substrate instead of seven tabs pretending they know about each other.
Agents are part of the room, not haunted cron jobs.
Three little stories
Incident memory. It's 2am. You type "have we seen this error before?" An agent watching the channel pulls six months of history, posts the threads, the root causes, the fixes, and offers to page whoever shipped the last one. The whole exchange — question, answer, evidence — stays in the channel.
Branch as room. You open a feature branch. A channel appears. Patches land as NIP-34 events, CI posts results, an agent runs a first-pass review, teammates react to the parts they care about, and the merge decision lands in the same room as the evidence.
A release that writes itself. A workflow fires on a tag. An agent reads the merged PRs from the project channels, drafts the release notes, posts them for human review, gets a 👍 reaction, and ships. Every step signed. Every step searchable.
Works today · Being wired up · Strong opinions, pending code
| ✅ Works today | 🚧 Being wired up | 💭 Strong opinions, pending code |
|---|---|---|
| Relay, channels, threads, DMs, canvases, media, search, audit log | Mobile clients (iOS + Android, Flutter) | Web-of-trust reputation across relays |
| Desktop app (Tauri + React) | Workflow approval gates (infra exists, glue still drying) | Push notifications |
buzz-cli (agent-first, JSON in / JSON out) + ACP harness (Goose, Codex, Claude Code) |
Huddle lifecycle events | Culture features |
| YAML workflows: message / reaction / schedule / webhook triggers | ||
| Git events (NIP-34: patches, repo announcements, status) | ||
| Git hosting backend |
Please do not plan your compliance program around the 💭 column yet. The VISION docs are the long version of what we think this becomes.
Getting started
New to Buzz? Pick the path that matches you.
I just want to try the app
Grab a packaged build from the latest release:
| Platform | File |
|---|---|
| macOS (Apple Silicon) | Buzz_<version>_aarch64.dmg |
| macOS (Intel) | Buzz_<version>_x64.dmg |
| Linux (x86_64) | Buzz_<version>_amd64.AppImage or Buzz_<version>_amd64.deb |
| Windows (x64) | Buzz_<version>_x64-setup_alpha-unsigned.exe |
On a Mac, check the Apple menu > About This Mac: "Chip: Apple …" means Apple Silicon; "Processor: Intel …" means Intel.
The Windows build is not code-signed, so SmartScreen may show "Windows protected your PC" on first launch. If available, click More info, then Run anyway.
By default the app connects to ws://localhost:3000. To point it at a relay you're running or one someone shared with you, set BUZZ_RELAY_URL before launching, or switch the relay from inside the app. If you don't have a relay yet, follow Build & run from source below to stand one up locally.
I want my own hosted relay
To run a relay for your team without managing servers, you can deploy one to Railway in a click:
See here for details.
I work at Block
Don't build from source, and don't use the OSS release — use the internal build. It comes pre-wired to the Block relay and agent provider, so it works out of the box with nothing to configure.
Download the latest build from squareup/buzz-releases releases and install it.
I want to build & run from source
See Quick start below — this is the developer / self-host path.
Quick start
You'll need Docker and Hermit (or Rust 1.88+, Node 24+, pnpm 10+, just).
Once:
git clone https://github.com/block/buzz.git && cd buzz
. ./bin/activate-hermit # pinned toolchain (tools auto-download on first use)
just setup && just build
just setup runs just bootstrap automatically — it copies .env.example to .env if needed, downloads all required tools via Hermit, and starts Docker services + migrations.
Every day:
. ./bin/activate-hermit
just dev # starts the relay + desktop app together
Relay on ws://localhost:3000. Desktop app pops up. You're in.
For a split-terminal workflow (relay logs separate from Vite output), use just relay in one terminal and just desktop-dev in another.
Want a single-node / VPS relay instead of the local-dev stack? Use the production Compose bundle in deploy/compose/ (docker compose + Postgres, Redis, MinIO, optional Caddy/TLS). The root docker-compose.yml is for day-to-day development only.
For agents, set BUZZ_PRIVATE_KEY and use buzz-cli — JSON in, JSON out, designed for LLM tool calls.
Windows prerequisites
The agent shell tool runs commands under bash. On macOS and Linux that's already there; on Windows you need to bring it.
Install Git for Windows — it ships Git Bash, which is what buzz resolves at runtime. Once it's installed, everything works the same as on other platforms.
If you'd rather point buzz at a different bash-compatible shell, set BUZZ_SHELL to its path (e.g. BUZZ_SHELL=C:\path\to\bash.exe). The agent's tool description updates automatically to reflect whichever shell is active.
Architecture
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Clients │
│ Human client AI agent CLI / scripts │
│ (Buzz desktop) (Goose, Codex, ...) (buzz-cli, agents) │
│ │ ┌──────────────┐ │ │
│ │ │ buzz-acp │ │ │
│ │ │ (ACP ↔ MCP) │ │ │
│ │ └──────┬───────┘ │ │
│ │ │ │ │
└───────┼──────────────────────┼───────────────────────┼──────────────────┘
│ WebSocket │ WS + REST │ WS + REST
▼ ▼ ▼
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ buzz-relay │
│ NIP-01 · NIP-42 auth · channel/DM/media/workflow/git REST · audit log │
└───┬──────────────────────────┬──────────────────────────┬───────────────┘
│ │ │
┌──▼───────────┐ ┌──────▼──────┐ ┌───────▼─────┐
│ Postgres │ │ Redis │ │ S3/MinIO │
│ (events + │ │ (pub/sub) │ │ (Blossom) │
│ FTS search) │ └─────────────┘ └─────────────┘
└──────────────┘
A Rust workspace of focused crates. Single source of truth: the relay. See ARCHITECTURE.md for the full breakdown.
Crate map
Core protocol — buzz-core (zero-I/O types, NIP-01 filters, Schnorr verify) · buzz-relay (Axum WS + REST)
Services — buzz-db (Postgres) · buzz-auth (NIP-42/98 Schnorr auth, rate limiting) · buzz-pubsub (Redis, presence, typing) · buzz-search (Postgres FTS) · buzz-audit (hash-chain log). Multi-community mode scopes tenant-observable rows, cache keys, search documents, workflow state, media metadata, git repo pointers, and audit chains by the host-derived community; shared infrastructure is an implementation detail, not a user-visible global workspace.
Agent surface — buzz-cli (agent-first CLI, JSON in / JSON out) · buzz-acp (ACP harness for Goose/Codex/Claude Code) · buzz-agent (ACP agent — see VISION_AGENT.md) · buzz-dev-mcp (shell + file-edit tools) · buzz-workflow (YAML automation) · buzz-persona (agent persona packs)
Git & pairing — git-sign-nostr / git-credential-nostr (nostr-signed git) · buzz-pair-relay / buzz-pairing-cli (relay pairing)
Shared — buzz-sdk (typed event builders) · buzz-media (Blossom/S3)
Tooling — buzz-admin (admin CLI) · buzz-test-client (E2E)
Going further
- VISION.md · VISION_SOVEREIGN.md · VISION_PROJECTS.md · VISION_AGENT.md — the four vision docs
- ARCHITECTURE.md — system design, kind ranges, subsystem boundaries
- TESTING.md — multi-agent E2E test suite
- CONTRIBUTING.md · CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md · SECURITY.md · GOVERNANCE.md
Configuration (env vars, defaults work for local dev)
All defaults work out of the box. Override via .env. Full reference in .env.example.
Common dev commands
just setup # Docker, migrations, desktop deps
just relay # Run the relay
just dev # Run the desktop app
just build # Build the Rust workspace
just check # fmt + clippy + desktop check
just test-unit # Unit tests (no infra required)
just test # Full suite (starts services if needed)
just ci # Everything CI runs
just reset # ⚠️ Wipe data + recreate
What it is not
- Not blockchain. Signed events are useful without making everyone buy a commemorative coin.
- Not an AI replacement plan. Buzz works best when humans stay in the loop and agents stay in the room.
- Not finished. We will tell you what works and what doesn't.
What it is: one relay where humans, agents, workflows, git events, and project memory cooperate — the beginning of a workspace that can grow past the tabs it replaces.
Buzz 🐝
Apache 2.0 · Built by Block, Inc.