a38707d35c
🤖 Community bans had gaps. Audio sockets never checked them: the audio join path didn't look up ban state, and a ban closed only the member's root sockets, so a banned member could join a huddle or stay in one. An agent's access comes from its owner, but the ban and timeout checks only looked at the pubkey that signed the event. Several write paths returned before those checks ran, admission could miss a ban that landed mid-AUTH, and removing or losing a member left live sockets open. This PR closes those gaps. ## Audio - `handlers/auth.rs`: the root socket's ban lookup, including the NIP-OA owner cascade and fail-closed DB handling, is `community_ban_outcome`. Root auth and audio join both call it, so the two checks can't drift apart. - `audio/handler.rs`: audio join runs the ban check after the write-free channel membership check and before any huddle lease or durable write. A ban is refused with `AuthorizationDenied` and a DB error with `AuthorizationUnavailable`. With no FI assertion, the refusal is the root route's text (`blocked: you are banned from this community` / `error: internal error checking restriction state`). - `state.rs`: `CommunityConnectionControl` holds the authenticated pubkey. `CommunityConnectionRegistry::disconnect_pubkey` closes bound audio sockets for one pubkey in one community with a 1008 `access revoked` close. `AppState::disconnect_pubkey_local` closes everything a pubkey has open in a community on this pod (root and audio); the clusterwide disconnect and the conn-control Redis subscriber in `main.rs` both use it, so remote pods close audio sockets too. Root sockets are still closed through `ConnectionManager`, so nothing is closed twice. A socket that proved a NIP-FI identity instead gets the standard NIP-FI denial (the restricted frame, then 1008 `authorization denied`), and a ban never overwrites a close reason already chosen. ## Behavior - **Owner restrictions carry to agents.** `restriction_state` folds in the restriction row of the agent's owner (`users.agent_owner_pubkey`) at read time. Nothing is copied onto the agent, so unbanning or un-timing-out the owner restores the agent immediately. Every hot-path caller (AUTH, ingest, audio, HTTP) picks this up. - **Admission is fenced against a concurrent ban.** Root AUTH and audio admission bind the proven pubkey to the socket first, then make the final ban and relay-membership decision (`handlers::auth::final_admission_denial`), then refuse if a disconnect already cancelled the socket. A ban or removal whose disconnect ran before the bind is visible to those fresh reads; one that runs after it finds and closes the bound socket. Both reads come from the writer, never the bounded-stale replica, so a removal that committed before the bind cannot be undone by a lagging replica. Both fail closed, and the check covers a delegated agent's owner. Each admitted socket records the agent's owner, from the NIP-OA tag or the stored link. - **Agents are always linked to their owner before admission.** Root AUTH and audio both record `users.agent_owner_pubkey` for a NIP-OA agent before admitting it, and refuse admission (`error: internal error recording agent owner`) if that write fails, because revoking the owner finds the agent's sockets through that link. - **Revoking live access covers agents without a database read.** `AppState::revoke_live_access` sends one clusterwide disconnect that closes, on every pod, each root and audio socket in the community whose principal **or recorded owner** is the target. An agent socket admitted before its owner link existed carries no recorded owner, so recording an owner for the first time (`materialize_nip_oa_owner`, the single writer used by root AUTH, audio admission and HTTP NIP-OA) closes that agent's ownerless root and audio sockets clusterwide; they reconnect with the owner attached. That disconnect skips owner-bound sockets. Admission with a NIP-OA owner records it on the socket before binding the pubkey, so the socket survives its own link; admission without one binds the pubkey first and then reads the stored owner, so a concurrent link either closes the socket or is seen by the read. A `users.agent_owner_pubkey` sweep still runs as a secondary path; if its lookup fails, the error is returned and there is no retry task. The kind-9040 ban, the report-action ban (left non-terminal so recovery re-runs it), relay-admin removal (9031), and NIP-43 self-leave all use it and report an incomplete revoke instead of claiming success. Each revokes right after its change commits; the ban no longer waits on its audit insert, whose error is still returned. - **NIP-43 self-leave works over WebSocket.** Kind 28936 is in the ephemeral range, so `handle_event` used to fan it out and answer `OK true` without removing membership. It is now routed to ingest; no other ephemeral kind changes. - **The write gate runs before every kind-specific branch.** `enforce_write_restriction` runs ahead of command routing (DM open, DM add member, DM hide, workflow definitions and triggers, approvals), product feedback, reports, and moderation or relay-admin commands. Ephemeral events and agent observer frames return before ingest in `handle_event`, so they go through the same gate there. - A ban exempts nothing. - A timeout admits only reports (kind 1984), unban (9041) and untimeout (9043). A timed-out admin cannot send relay-admin commands (9030–9033) until the timeout ends. - **HTTP refuses banned principals.** `enforce_relay_membership` runs a ban check after the membership decision, including on open relays: 403 `blocked: you are banned from this community` for a ban, 503 for a failed lookup. Media upload, media GET/HEAD and Git transport keep that 503 instead of reporting it as "not a relay member": in NIP-FI Enforce mode they send the canonical `AuthorizationUnavailable` response (`text/plain; charset=utf-8`, `authorization unavailable\n`), and in Off mode each keeps its legacy unavailable response. Media storage failures are not reclassified. Git transport checks membership and then runs its own ban check once per request. The NIP-OA owner is resolved from `x-auth-tag` when present. HTTP checks **bans only**: a timeout blocks writes, HTTP writes already reach the ingest gate, and reading stays allowed under a timeout. Unchanged by design: a lost Redis fan-out can leave another pod's socket open until it reconnects, and there is no recurring ban recheck on open sockets. ## Path table | Path | Category | Ban check | |---|---|---| | Root WebSocket AUTH and audio admission, including NIP-OA owner binding | community admission | final fenced check after bind; owner link required | | `POST /events`, `/query`, `/count` (`bridge.rs`) | community HTTP | existing `enforce_relay_membership` caller | | GIF search and `POST /gifs/share` (`gifs.rs`), media upload and fetch (`media.rs`), workflows (`workflows.rs`) | community HTTP | existing caller; media keeps 503 on lookup failure | | Git transport (`git/transport.rs`), git settings (`git/settings.rs`) | community HTTP | existing caller; transport keeps 503 on lookup failure | | `GET /moderation/reports`, `/moderation/audit`, `/moderation/restricted` | community HTTP | **newly covered** | | `POST /api/invites` (invite mint) | community HTTP | **newly covered** | | NIP-43 self-leave (WebSocket and `POST /events`, both via ingest) | roster change | revokes live access like admin removal | | Invite claim, accept-policy, `/api/join-policy*` | pre-membership invite and policy flows | none; ban state is checked when the caller authenticates | | `/`, `/info`, `/.well-known/nostr.json`, `/health`, `/_liveness`, `/_readiness` | public metadata and health | none | | `/hooks/{id}` | secret-authenticated webhooks | none; no community pubkey | | `/operator/*`, `/api/admin/v1`, `/internal/git/policy` | operator, admin and internal routes | none; separate auth plane | | `/_mesh/demo/echo` | demo only (mesh plus `mesh_demo_echo`) | none | ## Known limits - Cross-pod closure depends on the Redis fan-out; the tests prove the pod-local close by principal and recorded owner. - Live delivery to existing subscriptions depends on the disconnect. Events are not rechecked one by one. --------- Signed-off-by: Will Pfleger <pfleger.will@gmail.com> Co-authored-by: Hayt <211b96e6a2b7f45fd4047988976c7bbbeeda0c15f3ae7b32eec20834b5a55118@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.