Dumb relays is what make nostr tick š š
Discussion
What would making relays a first class citizen look like? Iām hugely in favor of a swarm of small, dumb relays. Really helps decentralise and add censorship resistance
Surfacing interactions with them to the user level and make them top of the knobs a user plays with.
But for that to make sense they need to differentiate. Chicken and egg problem.
But in this case, relays canāt do much to differentiate/Balkanize if clients donāt provide more levers to the user. 
Yeah Iāve been thinking about that too.
I started building a relay explorer so that I could inspect whatās in a relay (and eventually query for things like communities or relay lists or other items that help with discovering more Nostr folks)
It makes me think Iāll wanna add the ability to not just inspect a relay but discover relays.
Would that aid in the effort of balkanisation?
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In general tools to understand relays are severely lacking, but I think thatās a byproduct from the fact that all relays are used indistinctively by clients, so all people that might query stuff about a relay solely use speed/uptime metrics, which I think is boring and barely useful.
A tool like the one you mention is downstream from clients changing their behavior.
But hey, you want to skate where the puck is going, not where it is.
The question every mildly curious person asks is āwhat relays should I use?ā
Is a good question (currently) without an answer. Itās highly subjective. And, again, speed/latency/uptime is maybe 2% of the answer.
Agreed, Iāve definitely had that same question.
I definitely wanna hack on this.
I know you can query relay metadata. And people can publish relay lists. Iām wondering if relays can currently state in their metadata some concept of ācommunitiesā that the relay is āintended forā
Something optional that just indicates what the relayās host wants to attract. They wouldnāt boot people based on this, theyād just be raising their hand so that people can find the relay based on interests/identity/locale/etc.
If that already exists then Iāll just build a relay discovery tool that aggregates this info in a way thatās searchable by Nostr users.
If not I may try to add a NIP for it / set a pattern and see if people are interested even before a NIP.
What do you think?
nostr:npub1l2vyh47mk2p0qlsku7hg0vn29faehy9hy34ygaclpn66ukqp3afqutajft do you have any additional thoughts? Gonna work on this in some spare time but would love feedback
š this idea