Each relay needs a brand and an identity.
Discussion
I 100% agree with this. I believe this will happen organically as relays get to the point they need to complete.
Why though? I think commodotized relays are good for decentralization.
Stoner relay agrees
Can there be relay swarms with brands and social grouping? Like groups of relays? Having just 1 I think limits the decentralized aspect by funneling certain conversations through one place
I don't see what stops relays marketing similar things
True for each service.
For relays off the top of my head i know of Wine, orange pill, and I think nostrplebs.
That would be so helpful.
do you believe relays should have any primary organizing principles?
e.g., topics, geography/location, etc?
With nostr:npub16fcy8ynknssdv7s487nh4p2h4vr3aun64lpfea45d7h4sts9jheqevshgh we focus on high availability by having the geographic relays transparent to users. All notes are streamed (synced) across all relays we run. But Brazilian users, for example would all connect and benefit from a short number of hops to their geo relay.
I do think in the future there may be special interest relays. Or ones with select users with write access but these should still stream to other "Tier 1" relays. Big relay operators need to commit to streaming between themselves or will end up with centralized silos.
Oh, thanks for sharing. I just discovered that they follow me, so I have write permission. I added the relay now. It looks promising, especially because they have relays in two of the countries where I spend most of my time 🤙
Yes. Not necessarily all relays, but that kind of content segregation could be a big Nostr feature.
100% agreed
the lack of experimentation on this is very strange, and I think it's because clients make it too hard to navigate across relay sets
How is this supposed to compose? Paste a hashtag on-top of every note made to the relay? Currently you would have to sort notes based on their relay, which is a bad idea.
I was thinking about this the other day, instead of a moderation policy, relays could have a default topic that notes are required to adhere to. Maybe added to something like NIP-11?
More like all the people from a particular community write to one or two relays plus randomly to some public ones. If you want the best content for a particular community you’ll subscribe to one of the ones that’s favored by that community. If you want to be seen and heard in that community you’ll pay for those relays.
Ah right, sure. Relays hold the power, might as well structure the community that way as well. Still, I don't think public relays are a dead-end, they just need better organization.
Public relays are important. They’re how you talk to random people outside your community. But they’re likely to purge your posts after a while. Community relays are home base.
The UI would have to be discovered. Probably use different screens for each relay or relay group.
We agree! 😉
That’s our strategy… #LGBT & #porn …
Do you think clients should have the ability to post on selected relays? Does it already exist? 🤔
For example, if I want to only broadcast a note to people who are interested in a specific interest relay.
You can edit your relay list in chosen client. Not aware of any special interest relays. Would be hard to do unless was an allow write access list of certain npubs (users) and everyone else just has read access to relay.
Isn't that how paid relays work now?
Yes, but is more getting users to accept that they are adding read-only relays to get access to that user/content with no expectation of ever getting write-access. Then there is the concept of allowing other relays to stream from these read-only relays or making them a silo where people are forced to add them to access content.
Yes, I think that should be one of the primary experiences of Nostr.
having this UX properly implemented by clients will make it painfully obvious how different, vastly more creative, the nostr experience can be compared to centralized platforms
the current "a single list of relays" UX is very much designed with a legacy architecture in mind
Relay icons help with this
Seems most relays if seen in a list do not have much info aside from NIP-11 info. This is why I made our relay use the same TLD for web sockets and the website about the relay. This would go a long way in helping people find ToS and other info on relays they add.
https://relayable.org/nginx-top-level-domain-websockets-site.html