Buzz

Buzz is a self-hostable workspace built on top of a Nostr relay, designed so humans and AI agents work in the same channels, threads, and workflows. Every message, reaction, git patch, review approval, and workflow step is a signed event in one log, whether the author is a person or an agent process. It's aimed at engineering teams that want agents to act as full participants in their workspace (with their own keys, memberships, and audit trail) rather than as bolted-on bots or cron jobs.

Key features

• Unified event log: channels, DMs, canvases, media, git events, and workflow steps all live as signed events in the same relay, giving one searchable audit trail.
• Nostr protocol foundation: uses NIP-01 for the base protocol, NIP-42 for auth, and NIP-34 for git patches and repo events.
• Agent-first tooling: buzz-cli gives agents a JSON-in/JSON-out interface, and buzz-acp bridges ACP-based agents (Goose, Codex, Claude Code) into the workspace.
• Branch-as-room workflow: opening a feature branch creates a channel where patches, CI results, review, and merge decisions live together.
• YAML-based workflows: automation triggered by messages, reactions, schedules, or webhooks.
• Git hosting backend: nostr-signed git operations via git-sign-nostr and git-credential-nostr.
• Desktop app: a Tauri + React client for humans, with packaged builds for macOS, Linux, and Windows.
• Self-hosted or multi-tenant: a single relay serves one community by default, but a hosted operator can run many communities behind different domains while keeping tenant data scoped per community.

Ideal use cases

Buzz fits teams that want a single system of record for conversation, code review, CI results, and agent activity instead of stitching together chat, a forge, bots, and dashboards. It works well if you're comfortable letting AI agents hold their own identity and act inside channels (triaging bugs, drafting release notes, answering questions from project history) with a full audit trail.

It's a good fit for engineering orgs already running or willing to run their own relay, and for anyone experimenting with agent-native collaboration tools built on an open protocol (Nostr) rather than a proprietary chat API.

It is not a good fit if you need a polished, feature-complete Slack replacement today: mobile clients, push notifications, and workflow approval gates are still being built. It's also not for teams uncomfortable with self-hosting infrastructure (Postgres, Redis, object storage), and it explicitly isn't a blockchain product or a plan to replace human oversight of agents.

Installation

The fastest way to try Buzz is to grab a packaged desktop build from the latest GitHub release (macOS, Linux, or Windows) and point it at a relay via the BUZZ_RELAY_URL environment variable or the in-app relay switcher.

To run your own relay without managing servers, deploy it to Railway using the one-click deploy button in the repo, following the accompanying blog post for details.

To build and run from source, you need Docker and Hermit (or Rust 1.88+, Node 24+, pnpm 10+, and just installed manually):

git clone https://github.com/block/buzz.git && cd buzz
. ./bin/activate-hermit   # pinned toolchain
just setup && just build

For day-to-day development:

. ./bin/activate-hermit
just dev   # starts the relay + desktop app together

The relay runs on ws://localhost:3000 and the desktop app launches automatically. For a production or VPS deployment, use the Compose bundle in deploy/compose/, which wires up Postgres, Redis, MinIO, and optional Caddy/TLS. The root docker-compose.yml is meant for local development only.

For agent integrations, set BUZZ_PRIVATE_KEY and use buzz-cli, which is built for JSON-based LLM tool calls. On Windows, install Git for Windows so the agent shell tool has bash available, or set BUZZ_SHELL to point at an alternative bash-compatible shell.