Yep, either that or embed the crawler directly on citrine. nostr:nprofile1qqs827g8dkd07zjvlhh60csytujgd3l9mz7x807xk3fewge7rwlukxgpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhszrnhwden5te0dehhxtnvdakz7qgswaehxw309ahx7um5wghx6mmd9usjfpck leads that project if you want to discuss some UI work.
Discussion
Just to clarify, my 50K offer is for an Android Blossom server since, IMO, it’s a simpler problem to tackle. Citrine is great software—the best we have on Android—but it still needs work before it can be a reliable public personal relay. For example, the Amethyst kind 10002/relay metadata list write loop bug alone can crash Citrine after writing about 100K events.
Citrine also needs user-friendly options for exposing it to the Internet, like a toggle to enable an Onion service or something like Ngrok/Cloudflare Tunnel for folks behind NAT. Admin tools need improvement too. Right now, cleaning up events means either exporting and editing a JSONL file, wiping the DB and reimporting, or knowing enough about mobile development to use Room to access SQLite and delete events manually.
While the crawler idea is certainly a step in the right direction, I’d rather see mobile devs focus on improving Citrine’s relay functionality first. From what I’ve seen with Haven/khatru, Nostr clients can be spammy, dumping all kinds of junk onto relays. Without tools to handle this in Citrine, importing hundreds of thousands—or even millions—of events (most of it junk) to your phone isn’t really worth it yet.
So what to me looks more like a hackathon project than months of work for a rockstar dev is this issue https://github.com/greenart7c3/Citrine/issues/27 - you make sure that all events go through your local citrine relay which in turn handles all communication to other relays via TOR.
The more I think about it, the more I see it's more than a weekend project but 3 to 9 months? As you talk about UI/UX I guess a major part of the challenge is to actually hide it from the user and there is hardly a way around having some always-online inbox/outbox relays that my grandma couldn't be bothered to choose, so I don't know how you see this part getting resolved as part of the task.
Also you are talking about a "crawler", which to me doesn't fit my understanding of the rest of the task. An indexer maybe?
Maybe it's more of a syncer than anything. Like a Dropbox for events, but acessing thousands of servers to see what they have and list to the user or delete.
You replied to the Citrine issue at https://github.com/greenart7c3/Citrine/issues/27 and I'm still not sure where things are so complicated that it would cost 1BTC to implement it. On the contrary I see potential for a paid service that could turn this whole thing into a profitable business. But a 1BTC kickstart would make it more atractive to get started. So again, who has funds for what exactly?
I agree. It could be a profitable business. So much that there is a possibility for VC investment, depending on the model.
Opensats can grant 1BTC/yr. You just need to start and apply. I think there is a pitch for the HRF as well to make sure comms are uncensorable and to know when activists are being censored.
But I didn't meant that people will help kickstart it. You will have to show some proof of work before anyone invests in.
Ceck your email or tell me here where to reach you for DMs ;)