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Blake 2y ago

Your relays don’t just matter based on who you follow. Here’s what else relay choice impacts

* your personal timeline (with replies)

* your event publish reach to your followers

* your inbound DMs

* your outbound DMs

* your notifications

* any global timeline

* event relay hints you reply to or view threads

And the right relays today are likely different in a week - at least for a number of reasons. The best relay to publish a specific event is different between events (a sent DM is different from a global feed note, different again a reply on a poorly replicated event).

Relay selection is a deceptively complex topic. Any overly simplistic autopilot is likely a step backwards for users experience.

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Discussion

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WARTIME PSYCHOPATH™ ☣️⚔️ 2y ago

Yes, I've restricted my Relays to half random and half geographically close to me, and that seems to have made a big difference.

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Bitkorns 2y ago

How many relays is "enough"? Is there a good list somewhere?

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WARTIME PSYCHOPATH™ ☣️⚔️ 2y ago

I have 10 and everything seems smooth. Hard to know if I'm missing posts and things, but seems good

https://nostr.watch/relays/find

Then move the map to around you, click on pins and it says the name. That relay URL is what you need to add or remove from your Relay list. Make sure you Post/Save changes to the network and double check, some clients seem to have trouble pushing changes to the network.

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KAB 13% 2y ago

How do you find out if a Relay is geographically close? If it is not to much of a hassle.

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WARTIME PSYCHOPATH™ ☣️⚔️ 2y ago

https://nostr.watch/relays/find

Then move the map to around you, click on pins and it says the name. That relay URL is what you need to add or remove from your Relay list. Make sure you Post/Save changes to the network and double check, some clients seem to have trouble pushing changes to the network.

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Big5exy 2y ago

Bruh, that site is so sick!

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Blake 2y ago

What kinds of difference? Performance, previously missed content?

In theory it’s possible to backtest relays and compare what events were missed or gained with different relays lists. Likely useful, but not indicative of what you should use going forward either.

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WARTIME PSYCHOPATH™ ☣️⚔️ 2y ago

Things loading faster now, high bandwidth usage, but pretty good performance scrolling and not seeing as much "message loading" type placeholder messages. Obviously all the relays I started with were random from something, I forget what

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fiatjaf 2y ago

Where is your relay selection service?

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Blake 2y ago

Damn. Just lost my reply with a swipe down.

Short answer.. coming. I think it can be useful for inbound event coverage, however client apps need to better at selecting and connecting to relays outside of that list (maybe with option to disable) where they treat publishing a DM different to replying to a thread with a root hint of a relay they don’t have in their core set.

And an alternative which maybe I work on, is instead of the client app doing it, perhaps the relay can do it on their behalf and re-broadcast the event based on hints or DM target. It’s all an optimisation problem where I’m not sure clients will have enough information for the optimum outcome.. but often good enough.