009dc103f6
## Summary While the app is open, a 60s timer reads the whole channel list again: every membership roster, the channel metadata, and the unread catch-up. On the test account that is **about 4MB of JSON every minute** on the 12 mini, about 240MB an hour, whether or not anything changed. The live subscriptions already deliver what the list is built from, so this PR removes the timer. The list is read again when a live event says it may have changed: - a relay notice that tags this reader: added to a channel or a new DM (kind 44100), removed from one (44101), or a DM hidden or shown on another device (30622) - a metadata edit on a listed channel (kind 9002, now part of the live filter) - a system notice on a listed channel that changes the channel itself: archived (including the relay auto-archiving an idle ephemeral channel), unarchived, deleted, visibility, topic, purpose, TTL and similar. Member joins and leaves don't count. The read starts 2s after the last such event, and no later than 10s after the first, so a burst costs one read. Reads start at least 10s apart however busy the relay is. A read that fails is retried with backoff (5s, doubling up to 5 minutes), including the read after a resume or reconnect. Nothing is read in the background: launch, resume, reconnect and pull to refresh read the list as before. Live subscriptions ask for no stored events (`limit: 0`), so nothing sent while one is down is replayed. So: - Each list read opens the notice subscription before it reads, and the read covers anything sent before. - If the relay closes the notice subscription or a channel chunk for a reason that may clear (busy, rate-limited, timed out), the relay session reopens it itself, as before. The channel list now hears about that through `subscribeWithStatus`. - If the relay refuses one as over its subscription limit, only that REQ is retried, after a jittered backoff (5s, doubling up to 5 minutes). The backoff starts over once a reopened subscription has stayed up for a minute. Any other refusal (`restricted:`, `invalid:` and so on) can't succeed unchanged, so it is left alone until the next connection, as on main. - A reopened subscription that is still up when its read comes due counts as a change, so the list is read once to catch up on what it missed. If the relay admits a REQ and then closes it again, it triggers no reads. Known gaps, accepted: deleting a channel or kicking a member sends this reader no notice, and archived channels have no live coverage, so an unarchive done on another device isn't seen. An edit to a newly added channel that lands in the round trip between reading its metadata and its live subscription starting is also missed. The list catches up on the next launch, resume, reconnect or pull to refresh. Archiving or unarchiving on this device re-reads the list at once, as before. ## Measurements iPhone 12 mini on Wi-Fi against the internal relay, app open and idle, instrumented profile build (HTTP response bodies after decompression, websocket text in). Measured on an earlier revision of this PR, which read on a 60s tick only after a change. Idle behavior is the same now (no change, no read). | 10 idle minutes | main | this PR | | --- | --- | --- | | Channel list reads | 10 | 1 | | HTTP queries | 40 | 5 | | HTTP response bytes | 39.9MB | 4.0MB | | Websocket bytes in | 4.4MB | 1.1MB | On main, every tick read memberships (348KB), another 310KB query and the unread catch-up (3.3MB). With this PR, the only read in the window came right after another device hid or showed a DM (kind 30622), which is exactly the kind of change it should pick up. Sizes are JSON after decompression; the relay gzips responses, so wire bytes are smaller (not measured). [#8901](https://github.com/block/buzz/pull/8901) separately shrinks each read's unread catch-up; the two are independent. ## Testing - New journey test: with the app open and nothing changing, nothing is read. Adding the reader to a channel, renaming a listed channel, archiving or auto-archiving one and removing the reader each cause one read about 2s later, and a member joining causes none. A change right after a read waits out the 10s gap. A steady stream of changes is read after 10s and then no more than every 10s. A burst costs one read. A failed read is retried with backoff and then stops. - New journey test, for the notice subscription and for a channel chunk: the relay refuses it twice as over its limit while the list changes. It is retried with backoff, and once it has stayed up the list is read once to catch up. Later the relay drops it, and having stayed up it is reopened within about 5s and catches up again. Then it delivers live. The relay then closes it as busy while the list changes, and the list catches up once it is back; closed again right after reopening, it triggers no read until it stays up. Refused as `restricted:`, it is not retried. - The resume journey: a reconnect read and a resume read each fail once while a channel is added, and each is retried and shows the channel. - Each guard was removed once to confirm a test fails: the debounce, the max wait, the minimum gap, the read retry (including after reconnect and resume), the catch-up reads after a retry or a relay-session reopen, the still-up checks, the backoff restart, the background check, retrying only capacity refusals, and clearing refusals on a new connection. - The terminal-rejection tests expect a chunk refused as `restricted:` never to be retried on that connection or to cause a list or history read, and a new connection to retry it at once. - `just mobile-check` and `just mobile-test` pass. - Device: on the 12 mini, 10 idle minutes with the app open, before and after (table above). 🤖 Generated with [Claude Code](https://claude.com/claude-code) --------- Signed-off-by: Tom Brow <tomb@squareup.com> Co-authored-by: Tom Brow <tomb@squareup.com> Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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
Community
- Buzz feedback community — ask questions, share feedback, and connect with other Buzz users
- @buzzdotxyz on X — news and updates
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.