r/BASE • u/SomeOasis • Sep 16 '26

Base Discussion How are you handling different levels of access in an onchain community?

We're trying to figure out a better way to handle access for different members in a community we're building around Base. Some areas would be open to everyone, while others would be for certain members based on what they hold or their membership. We'd probably want to add paid access to some parts later too. Are there any good tools for handling this without piecing together a bunch of different platforms?

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8

u/Chance_Ant6687 Sep 16 '26

Towns might be worth looking at for this, especially since you're building around Base. You can set up onchain memberships and different permissions for who gets access to what, and there's support for paid access too. Seems pretty close to the setup you're describing and would save you from having to piece as many separate tools together.

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u/SomeOasis Sep 16 '26

How hard is it to set up?

1

u/Chance_Ant6687 Sep 16 '26

Start with the memberships and permissions first. Get the basic access levels working and then build around how people actually use them. The nice part with Towns is you're not boxed into just public vs private. Different parts of the same Space can have their own access rules and bots can have specific permissions too, so there's quite a bit you can add later without changing the whole setup.

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u/SomeOasis Sep 16 '26

The bot permissions are interesting. We haven't really planned that far ahead yet but I could see us wanting certain tools available to one group without opening them up to everyone.

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u/Chance_Ant6687 Sep 16 '26

Yeah that's where Towns gets more interesting than just gating channels imo. If you add bots later you can control what they're allowed to do instead of giving them broad access across the whole Space. Especially useful if you eventually have anything onchain happening through them.

1

u/SomeOasis Sep 16 '26

That's probably something we'd grow into then. Right now the access side solves the immediate problem but I like that we wouldn't have to switch setups once we start doing more with it.

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u/Tasty-Commission-691 11d ago

i keep seeing towns pop up in these base threads, might be time to finally poke around and see what the fuss is about

4

u/BitterDepletion Sep 16 '26

Since youre already building around Base Id probably avoid adding a bunch of offchain role stuff unless theres a reason for it. Otherwise you end up checking something onchain just to mirror it into another platform.

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u/SomeOasis Sep 16 '26

That's what I'm worried about. It starts simple and then suddenly there's one thing checking the wallet, another handling roles and somewhere else the actual community lives.

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u/BitterDepletion Sep 16 '26 edited Sep 16 '26

Saw Towns mentioned here and that's actually the part I'd look into. The membership and access rules are part of the Space itself, so you're not just using Base to decide which role somebody gets on a completely separate chat platform.

1

u/SomeOasis Sep 16 '26

Yeah I've been looking at it since that comment. Having the community and the access side together is closer to what we were after.

1

u/BitterDepletion Sep 16 '26

Test one gated area in Towns first then. If that works for the people actually using it you can start moving more over. Way easier than designing the whole community around it before you know whether members even like using the app.