Let's say you had a forum that was private and at high risk of censorship.
If the forum URL gets leaked then it would be possible for the relays to see all the events that belong to that forum. If the relays your forum was connected to wanted to they would be able to delete all the forum posts related to your forum and delete any new posts that were made. This would censor the forum.
If this was to happen rather than create a new forum members could decide to add a salt to the forum. Adding a salt essentially keeps all the settings of the forum but creates a new space for posts and replies. All users who enter the same salt would see the same posts. The key is without knowing this added salt the relays (or whoever wanted to censor you) would have no way to know you had added a salt and they would have no idea which events on the relays belong to the new salted forum.
So in short it's a way of keeping a forum alive that is being censored.
It could also have other uses such as just having different topics hidden under different salts. Or a community forum where only certain members knew the secret salt to get the the hidden part of the forum.
Hope that makes sense. Happy to clarify.
npub1x5…kh2p2
2026-05-30 12:09:59 UTC
in reply to nevent1q…wxn4
Author Public Key
npub1x5t34kxd79m657qcuwp4zrypy9t8t4e6yks5zapjvau29t0xvgaqakh2p2Published at
2026-05-30 12:09:59 UTCEvent JSON
{
"id": "0000c2ae6d50c66587373733da610244764e21765ae4464618db3ed585e096ac",
"pubkey": "35171ad8cdf177aa7818e383510c81215675d73a25a14174326778a2ade6623a",
"created_at": 1780142999,
"kind": 1,
"tags": [
[
"e",
"0000ab81aae82a2ef18becb77eb4679e375c1554a202f24694217fa8e88437a3",
"wss://relay.ditto.pub/",
"root"
],
[
"e",
"06932160259c97b5112a1cd1d46ef5c46f9cb7b958de1c99c12c95e7985a520e",
"wss://nos.lol",
"reply"
],
[
"p",
"4c735c00197662e35011bf95bfeef1b28e41118130bd4887e53f3e573fb4e3d9"
],
[
"client",
"Wisp"
],
[
"nonce",
"37925",
"16"
]
],
"content": "Let's say you had a forum that was private and at high risk of censorship.\n\nIf the forum URL gets leaked then it would be possible for the relays to see all the events that belong to that forum. If the relays your forum was connected to wanted to they would be able to delete all the forum posts related to your forum and delete any new posts that were made. This would censor the forum. \n\nIf this was to happen rather than create a new forum members could decide to add a salt to the forum. Adding a salt essentially keeps all the settings of the forum but creates a new space for posts and replies. All users who enter the same salt would see the same posts. The key is without knowing this added salt the relays (or whoever wanted to censor you) would have no way to know you had added a salt and they would have no idea which events on the relays belong to the new salted forum. \n\nSo in short it's a way of keeping a forum alive that is being censored.\n\nIt could also have other uses such as just having different topics hidden under different salts. Or a community forum where only certain members knew the secret salt to get the the hidden part of the forum.\n\nHope that makes sense. Happy to clarify.",
"sig": "8b4d4240b424c28505a37d30c4c55141adf434ef02cf3f1c61f2e78fedb8ccf992e2545f4df844d36dfaedeb2f91d6d2fa712abc8a8b598a2cb475af7b3ee6ff"
}