Some thoughts about Nostr & Custom Feeds
A bunch of nostr apps have custom feeds, but they’re oddly one of the few things which aren’t reusable across apps. Over on bluesky, they’ve got 40k custom feed algorithms and it’s a really popular thing.
For example, here’s a feed of just pictures of moss: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:x3cya3wkt4n6u4ihmvpsc5if/feed/aaacynbxwimok
In particular though, there’s feeds for different takes on what should be for you, trending, top, etc…
We don’t have that in Nostr, and i wish we did. I’m going to outline a way in which i might be possible for us to get there.
First off, we’ve got to understand how the third party feeds work in bluesky. The way it works is that each user has a single PDS (think relay) where they post their content. That relay is then indexed, by a global index server (there can be multiple), which may or may not keep a cache of a users content.
An index is a third party service which clients can connect to and say, i’m bob and i want the feed “only posts by bobs”. That feed service does not keep a copy of the content, nor does it provide it to the clients. Instead when user Bob requests the “only posts by bobs” feed, it checks the user requesting, then it’s indexes of content, and returns an array of message id’s (hashes) for what it thinks is a good bobs feed. The clients then request that actual content from the relay (PDS) servers, or their caches. There’s even a service for no-code creation of custom feeds, skyfeed.app.
This would be pretty easy to make. A nostr relay service that instead of serving the full content, just lets you request a feed, and it would return message event id’s for the events in that feed. You’d then go request that content from relays that are hosting content. We could do it with dynamic lists too, but then we wouldn’t be able to customize it per user.
I’d like an easy way for developers to make and deploy custom feeds without having to have the whole own nostr app the way they need to do it now. As an app developer, i’d love people to be able to build their own feeds without me doing the work of tight integration.
I know that Damus has nostrscript which does some of this in the client, but it only works on one nostr client, and hasn’t really taken off yet. A server based solution might be a lot better. Something we can support that works with nostr, but lets people make many feeds.
Thoughts?
