Nexuses
A home for your whole community.
A Nexus is the community itself: members, roles, categories and Spaces, organised the way your group actually works.
- BBallastraNexus
- Announcements
- Community
- Development
- Voice
Morning — anyone looked at the new plugin API yet?
The new config loader cut our cold start in half.
Confirmed on my end too. Pairing in #coworking if anyone wants in.
What you can do
01
Categories
Group related Spaces and give them shared permissions.
02
Spaces
Text, Voice and Announcement rooms inside each category.
03
Roles & members
Decide who can see, post, invite and moderate.
04
Public or private
List it in Discover or keep it invite-only.
In practice
An open-source project, organised
Maintainers post releases in a read-only Announcements category. Contributors talk in Community. A members-only Development category holds code review, and a voice Space is always open for pairing.
What is a Nexus?
A Nexus is a community on Ballastra — the top-level container people join. It has its own name, members, roles, categories and Spaces, so one Nexus can look completely different from another: a Nexus for a side project is organised around the work, a Nexus for a study group is organised around courses, and a Nexus for a maker space is organised around people building things together.
Creating a Nexus is free and takes a minute. You give it a name and an icon, decide whether it is public or private, and then shape the inside: categories, Spaces, roles and all the rules of the community. Everything else in Ballastra hangs off the Nexus — messaging between members, voice rooms, notifications, even the Aeros developers build — which is what keeps the whole community in one place.
Nexus vs. server: what actually changes
If you have used other community apps, a Nexus is the familiar idea of a "server" or "workspace" — but led by structure rather than a wall of channels. The difference is deliberate: when you build a Nexus, categories and roles come first, and Spaces live inside them. A community stays navigable as it grows instead of quietly becoming one long scroll of channels where the signal is buried. If you are deciding whether the model fits, Nexuses and Spaces set out how the structure works, and the migration guide covers moving an existing community across.
The practical difference shows up in how a Nexus holds together. Members see the community the way the owner structured it: a small number of clear categories, each with the Spaces that belong there. Roles carry real permissions from day one, so a moderators-only Space or a members-only announcement Space works without creating a separate community. Structure and permission are part of the Nexus itself, not something bolted on later.
Who builds communities on Ballastra
Ballastra is aimed at builders — developers, makers, indie hackers, student devs and the teams around side projects. Those communities share a problem: the people in them want chat, voice and announcements in one place, plus the freedom to rearrange everything as the group changes shape. A Nexus gives them a container they own, organised the way the project actually is.
The same structure works well beyond software: a hackathon team runs a Nexus for the weekend, a creator keeps a public Nexus for their community and a private one for close collaborators, and a small startup uses a Nexus instead of stitching together three separate apps. Because a Nexus decides its own visibility, one account can belong to a dozen different shaped communities without anything colliding.
Public, private or invite-only
Every Nexus owner chooses how people join. A public Nexus shows up in Discover — Ballastra’s directory of communities that have opted in to being searchable — so new people can find it by interest. A private Nexus stays invisible and joins only through an invite link the owner controls.
Nothing is public by accident. Discover only lists Nexuses whose owners made them public, and invite links are per-community, so a private community stays private even when its members share links confidently. The choice belongs to the owner and can be changed as the community’s needs change.
What an owner controls
Owners shape a Nexus the way they want it to run: categories organise the Spaces, roles decide who can do what, and per-Space overrides let a role be broad in one part of the community and narrow in another. Moderation tools, member management and an audit trail of actions are part of the Nexus itself, so running a community does not mean juggling a second tool.
The point of all of it is that a growing community stays readable. When the 20-person group becomes 200, the same Nexus still shows a handful of clear categories instead of an unmanageable list of channels. Structure is what makes a community survivable at scale, and structure is what a Nexus leads with.
A Nexus for a side project, step by step
The fastest way to see what a Nexus actually changes is to sketch one. Imagine a side project with three people and a growing group of users. The owner creates a Nexus with two categories: Announcements and Community. Announcements holds one Space — releases — where only the owners can post. Community holds introductions, feedback and a voice Space for coworking.
Roles then do the rest: the three builders get a Builder role that can post everywhere and move conversations; community regulars get an active role with a members-only Space; everyone else reads and replies. None of this requires a second community, a second app, or a permissions spreadsheet — it is one Nexus, and the structure carries the growth. The roles and moderation page covers how this scales to larger communities.
Moving a community into a Nexus
Because a Nexus is built before it is filled, migrating a group from another app is low-risk. Create the Nexus, lay out categories and Spaces the way the community actually works, set roles and permissions, then invite members with a link. There is no automated importer yet — pinned announcements and reference conversations are moved manually into a migration Space — but a well-designed Nexus makes that manual step a one-time tidy-up rather than a project.
One community can also live in more than one place for a while. Many groups keep an old server or workspace running while members find their way to the Nexus, and close it later or keep it for what it is still good at. The Nexus model does not demand a hard cutover, which is why a community can move on its own schedule instead of on a migration deadline.
Common questions
A Nexus is a community on Ballastra — the top-level space people join. Each one has its own members, roles, categories and Spaces, so a Nexus for a side project looks nothing like a Nexus for a study group unless you want it to.
The idea is familiar if you have used other community apps, but a Nexus leads with structure rather than channels: categories and roles come first, so a community stays navigable as it grows instead of becoming a wall of channels.
Yes. Creating a Nexus is free, and you decide whether it is open for anyone to discover and join or kept private to people you invite.
Start your Nexus today.