Emphasis on "easy" 😅 - but if that's easy for you, please do & share! 🫂
Discussion
have i understood the exact query and sorting that you want? so, follow lists containing your npub sorted by how recently they were created/updated?
what kind of system do you need to be able to run it on? linux? windows? mac? i could just do the source code if you know how to install the compiler but otherwise i can provide a binary for the platform
oh, i could just pop it on my VPS as a service, you just put your npub in the path field and it returns the sorted list from as many relays as it can find it on, that would be even easier
Fantastic! 🧡
well, i'll do it just to put substance behind my words, in any case
well, i am kinda stuck on how to do this because spidering can be quite expensive in terms of time and bandwidth, and it's difficult to make it functional without being a spam attack on relays and where such queries are originating... or making reasonable limits on who can even fire off these query-storms
to implement what you want, you have to also have an extensive list of relays to use, before you can actually even make the queries
i've built a spider into my #realy relay that tries to get the follow/mute/profile/delete/report events from all whitelisted users, but chasing down randos who happen to follow you is a lot more traffic, if you see what i mean
I understand. Maybe it would make sense to build a DVM for this that charges for said query, and potentially caches some of the stuff? Or a DVM for arbitrary queries of one's social graph? Do we have a query language for this?
CC nostr:nprofile1qqsfnw64j8y3zesqlpz3qlf3lx6eutmu0cy6rluq96z0r4pa54tu5eqpz9mhxue69uhkummnw3ezuamfdejj7q6hdgd nostr:nprofile1qqszv6q4uryjzr06xfxxew34wwc5hmjfmfpqn229d72gfegsdn2q3fgprdmhxue69uhhxct5v4kxc6t5v5hxs7njvscngwfwvdhk6qgkwaehxw309a5kucn00qhxummnw3ezuamfdejsz9nhwden5te0wfjkccte9cc8scmgv96zucm0d57awgv0
yeah, that would be cool to have a specialised relay that just spiders the network constantly and only stores some small set of event kinds like this (wolud make sense to put profiles, follows and mutes, at least in one bundle) - then you literally can just have high confidence just from one query on it and done
and yeah, such a relay you probably would want to devise an npub compression scheme where it flattens the lists down by using a monotonic index number for each pubkey instead of storing them over and over and over again, and uses a variable length encoding so the actual size of follow events it stores is tiny
sounds like a fun project but it would take me a week or two to do it in parallel with my main paid gig
Yes. Can be done. For user search I actually pull all profiles from npubs from huge relays like damus and primal in a local database. Could also get their follow lists and then from there you could query pretty fast for followers etc. will take some time for initial sync and you need to update every couple of minutes but then it should work more or less fast locally.
nostrdb by nostr:nprofile1qqsr9cvzwc652r4m83d86ykplrnm9dg5gwdvzzn8ameanlvut35wy3gpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduq3qamnwvaz7tmwdaehgu3wwa5kuegpzemhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuurjd9kkzmpwdejhglzevy3 is probably the right tool for the "local cache" part
Could be. I use lmdb right now. Rust-nostr offers nice tools for here.
thanks for the provocation though, i'm going to do something i meant to do for ages, which is to apply maximum possible compression to follow/mute list storage, by creating an npub index with a monotonic counter value, then i could add a profile/follow/mute list spider that just gathers as many of these as it can find during the spider runs... commonly follow lists in particular are in the hundreds of kilobytes in size, with this optimization i can squash that down like tens of kilobytes per user, and thus store ten times as much of such events