Over at damus hq we are working on a privacy preserving push notification relay. This relay will always be on when you have push notifications enabled, but will not store anything. This will allow you to connect to private relay sets and still receive push notifications, and will work for DMs that require AUTH.

Otherwise, writing to the damus relay will have the same effect as the notification relay for public situations, but if you don’t have the damus relay in your relay list notifications should still work. It’s a bit more tricky for non ios clients using the same private relay sets, we could use #nip65 to help them know to write to our notification relay, or maybe you could explicitly add the notification relay if you want your ios friends to receive notifications.

Having a relay that you can trust not to store anything is key for this to work in a wide variety of situations. iOS push notifications are an inherently centralized thing, and getting it to work in a decentralized protocol is tricky, but we think this is an interesting approach to try vs the pull model used by nos.