NCE Feature Update (2026-03-18)

Last week groups launched. 600+ people joined them within days — a quarter of the user base — and four organizational patterns emerged on their own: taxonomy switchboards, editorial pipelines, self-organized commons, tight creative ensembles.

Members can now create their own groups, and those groups self-govern with their own owners, admins, and members. Access passes are wired up with paid tiers — purchase and subscribe flows will come online progressively after further testing. The post timeline can be filtered by group, and a new visual tag system lets space runners control how badges appear across the app.

Groupcore infrastructure: ONLINE

Last week's update covered the initial launch — here's everything that's landed since.

Groups, deepened

Members can create groups. You no longer need to be a space admin — any member can spin up a group, name it, pick a color, add an avatar, invite people, and create private channels for it. A reading club, a project team, an interest circle, a writers' room — whatever the space needs, members can build it themselves.

Safety rails keep this sane: groups you create start with private-only topics, so your channels don't appear in anyone else's sidebar until they opt in. You can only add people who follow you, and there's a cap of 10 groups per member. Space admins retain full override and can elevate any private group channel to be visible space-wide, so good stuff that starts in a group doesn't have to stay buried there. The blast radius for uninvolved members is zero.

Space runners control whether their space allows member-created groups — it defaults to on, but can be switched off in settings. We've turned it off for NCE for now while groups are still new, but it's on inside Forest Keepers — if you're in there, try creating one.

Groups self-govern. Groups now have their own role hierarchy — owner, admin, member — and the people inside them can manage things without involving the space admin. Group owners promote admins, admins manage members and configure who can post and chat, and topic access settings live at the group level. A reading club organizer can hand admin keys to a co-organizer and the group runs itself.

Group access control. A four-tier system governs who can do what within a group: admins only, access pass holders, all group members, or everyone. You set defaults for the whole group and then override per-topic, so a group can have public-facing topics where anyone reads but only members post alongside private channels that are completely invisible to non-members. The tiers compose naturally — all members can chat, but only access pass holders can post.

And per-topic:

Access passes. Last week we said these were next — they're here. Admins can create Stripe-backed access passes for groups with monthly, yearly, or one-time pricing. Access pass holders get the paid tier in group access control, which can unlock posting, chatting, and topic access that regular members don't have.

Right now access passes are admin-granted — space runners set up the pass, configure pricing, and grant it to members directly. This gives us a window to prove out the mechanics before enabling purchases. Paid group memberships will roll out progressively to select groups first, then go fully available later this month alongside the treasury and revenue splits release. The chain from the last update — pay → group → grants → access — is built and the money tap turns on soon.

Filter the timeline by group. A row of group avatars now appears above the topic pills on the post feed — click one and it scopes down to just that group's topics and posts. Useful when a space has several active groups producing content and you want to focus on what one of them is doing.

Find groups. You can search groups by name or topic name, sort by member count or creation date, and filter by join mode — important as some spaces already have dozens.

What's next for groups and money. Over the next several days, purchase flows come online — members will be able to buy access passes directly from group cards and during onboarding. Here's a preview of what that looks like:

Visual tags

New system for how group and role badges appear across the app. Space runners now have a configuration panel where they can control which badges show on member cards, reorder them to reflect what matters in the space, hide the ones that don't need to be visible, and decide which tags show up in @-mention autocomplete.

A space running an editorial operation might surface "Editor" and "Contributor" badges prominently while hiding internal roles, and a community space might let group badges dominate so members see each other's affiliations at a glance. This is the presentation layer for all the group and role infrastructure — the part that shapes what people actually see on every profile card and every @-mention.

Space channel controls

Space runners can now toggle the general channel, admin channel, and join messages on or off in space settings. Turning off the general channel means every post requires a topic — no more untethered posts floating in the feed. Turning off join messages cleans up chat in active spaces. These are small switches but they meaningfully change the shape of how a space feels, especially as spaces grow and the signal-to-noise question gets real.

---

If you're running a space and thinking about how groups could work for you, Lena published a set of practical patterns and a design worksheet in SpaceCamp — six approaches based on what kind of space you're building. Worth a read.

Groups started as structure inside spaces. What's becoming clear is they're the unit through which spaces self-organize — members creating the rooms they need, governing them, deciding who gets in and what happens inside. The infrastructure is online. Paid access, treasuries, and revenue splits are next.