Mantra

What it is

A press a group holds in common.

A group talks in private, keeps a library, translates a work into the languages its members actually speak, and publishes under a key that no single member holds.

Your identity is a key you own. There is no account to recover, no company to ask, and no server anywhere that can read what the group says.

Encryption

Nobody in the middle can read it.

Every message is sealed on the device that wrote it and opened only on the devices it was meant for. What a relay holds is ciphertext.

Group messaging runs on MLS — the IETF's messaging-layer security standard — under the Marmot protocol. Who sent a message is proven by their place in the group's key tree rather than by anything written inside the message, so nothing can claim to come from someone it did not. A private note to one member travels as an ordinary gift-wrapped event inside that same frame: the group can see that you wrote to someone, and only the recipient can read what you said.

Subgroups

A group can make another group.

A large group does not have to stay one room. A working party, a chapter team, a regional desk — each can be split off into a group that runs itself.

A subgroup is a full group in its own right. It runs its own key ceremony, so its key is fresh rather than derived from the parent's, and the shares are held by its own members. The parent cannot sign for it. What the parent gives it instead is a birth certificate — a statement, signed by a quorum of the parent's admins, that this room is its child — and anyone can check that claim afterwards.

That is what keeps a large group manageable. Work moves into the smaller room that owns it, with its own quorum and its own admins, while the line back to the parent stays provable. Anyone in the group can start one, whether or not they administer the parent.

Relays

No server in the middle to seize.

Mantra has no back end of its own. Messages travel over Nostr relays — plain, interchangeable servers that take an event and hand it back when asked.

A message goes out to several relays at once, and the group reads from whichever answers. No relay is privileged, none of them can read the messages it carries, and none of them is the app. You can point Mantra at whichever relays you like, including one you run yourself.

Practice

Three things it borrows from the practice.

• Stillness

  Nothing here is ranked, boosted, or timed to hold you. A relay keeps what it is handed and hands it back. It does not decide what you see.

• Repetition

  A mantra is repeated until it holds. So is a translation — proposed, reviewed, signed, chunk after chunk, until the work is whole.

• Resonance

  One key struck by many hands. The signature carries the whole group, and anyone at all can check it.

Where it runs

Supported on three platforms.

• Android
• iOS
• Desktop

Alpha Mantra is still in alpha testing, and sign-in is not open yet.

• Test it now

  If you just want to test, download the APK.

  Download the APK

• Unlock open testing

  TestFlight and Google Play open testing unlock by sending sats.

  bc1qsj003mfyylaca7jg5zndel2gvmja47gfhkpke9 Open in a wallet

• Read the source

  Mantra is built in the open. The code is there, and so are the notes on the protocols — the ceremonies, the subgroups, the sync — with the reasoning behind each decision rather than a summary of it.

  code.sigidli.com/mantra/mantra-kmp