Colighter 

Colighter is a collaborative, real-time web content highlighter, distributed over Nostr.

With Colighter, users can highlight content from any website and share it with others in real-time. Whether it's for research, team collaboration, or simply sharing an interesting article, Colighter makes it easy to highlight and share web content with others.

What we have

From this hackathon, we are close to an MVP that supports highlighting any web page on the internet.

• We sketched out what collaboration might look like when built on Nostr

• We deployed this as a v0 collab relay! Go https://colighter.nostrdocs.com

• We built the base Colighter experience, that would use this relay for hosting user's highlights and web annotations

We are working to tie loose ends and button this up. Then ship it all as a usable product for real Nostriches to try out and share feedback on.

A quick snippet

<iframe class="remirror-iframe remirror-iframe-youtube" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/hVV8t_9_guw?" data-embed-type="youtube" allowfullscreen="true" frameborder="0"></iframe>

Youtube: https://youtu.be/hVV8t_9_guw

How it's Built

aka, how the sausage is made

Colighter tech is a simple browser experience that blends and layers the Fluid Framework collaboration library over the Nostr Protocol.

General Requirements

A Colighter user benefits the most from seeing and sharing web page annotations from his community. Secondly, the user prefers to have sovereign control over their data, with degrees of assurance that they can highlight sensitive web resources while keeping control of who can see and access this data.

The most common way for enabling collab experiences is to send data to a central server which then propagates it to all clients logged in or connected to this server. Usually, collab experiences also require a user to create an identity controlled by the server.

The costs of running such centralized servers are directly correlated with the number of people collaborating in real-time. This implies that good collab experiences are served by large corporations that can afford to offset the costs of powerful collaboration servers.

Collab Experience, on Nostr

We chose to leverage Fluid Framework, a library that largely avoids centralized collaboration servers. 

In our adaptation and application of this framework over Nostr, the Colighter extension initiates a collaboration session in partnership with a Nostr relay of choice. There are two distinct scenarios for initializing collaboration experiences

1. Create new

If this is a new collab session, i.e. when a user navigates to a web resource where they have never been and no community member they know has previously created a public highlight on it, the relay creates a new collaborative resource on behalf of the user.

1. Load existing

If it’s a known web resource where a user has initiated collaboration before, the users collab relay will look for and load an existing collab document for the user to continue using.

A user can ask the relay to publish some information as an event to users within the users' community, inviting them to come collab in real-time. In this scenario, the invited users will just “Load” the collaboration resource from the relay when they visit the common web page they are annotating

Additional HIGHLIGHTS on the implementation

See what we did there?

• Colighter users choose which relay should save and serve their data to the community.
  the data for its data and communication architecture.

• They will have the ability to update permission levels on collaboration content they own. I.e they may decide to make highlights private or public or change their preference after initial creation.

• Relays use Nostr NIP-42 to authenticate a user before granting access to a collaborative Nostr document

• Relays can build revenue models over collab resource hosting and access.

• We think these requirements and patterns are easily generalizable across most real-time collab experiences, so check out what's next…

What's Next

You ask!

Colighter still isn’t the completed experience that we envisioned. We have an exciting roadmap, building towards a fully functional MVP for you and your friends to try out. Check out our Figma designs, and don’t forget to give us early feedback on what you would want to see in a tool like this. With this browser extension, we want to learn to feel alive because learning is better with friends.

Wait! there is more!!!

A huge part of building Colighter involved tweaking and integrating the Fluid Framework collab model to the Nostr protocol.  We only need to do this task once. And do it right.

That said, we have packaged a library that we’d like to deliver to the community as a tool for building real/near-real-time collaboration experiences on Nostr.

Now, imagine Google Docs, Forms, Paint, Notion, Canva, or Figma… all those cool collab tools that you know and love, rebuilt and made better by the identity sovereignty and data ownership afforded by Nostr.

Definitely a future we’d like to see, so we are going to make it happen.

Come. Collab with us!

Cool, where is the business??

Zapssss ⚡⚡⚡⚡

With a potential market of millions of students, researchers, and professionals, Colighter has significant growth potential. By offering a freemium business model, with basic features available for free and more advanced features available for a subscription fee, Colighter can attract a larger user base while generating revenue over time.

Zaps ⚡ are the future!

The Team

Proof of Work?

Check these out

Github: https://github.com/nostrdocs/colighter

Figma: https://www.figma.com/file/3BCida7fllCK6YnfKa7uSJ/coolighter