I have. It works.
Discussion
Oh I have one lying around too. What else would I need??
Not much else if it’s for your use only
How much storage do you need?
Minimal since you’ll only be storing your data
Is there really much point to running a relay only for personal use?
Censorship resistance. Backup of your notes. It can mirror other relays so you only need to connect to yours.
That's a great biz model, do you know if someone already offer this? Like i.e. a SaaS platform that let you download a backup on IPFS or local storage once in a while ...
Note that even then, you're still connecting to random webservers for NIP 5 stuff.
Good point, I would probably customize my client to avoid making NIP-05 requests if it made a noticeable impact on performance.
Glad you made it here Luke.
Yeah I still don’t see it really. I’m not concerned about backup of my own notes- that seems pretty insignificant, at least to me personally. I’d totally be up for running a more robust public relay to support the protocol and allow other users to connect, transmit notes, and protect free speech etc. But if it’s only personal use, there are already a decent number of public relays- and there will likely always be new ones. If I connect to a large enough number of them, it seems my notes have very little chance of being censored by all of them? And even if they do, I can just whip up a new key pair in seconds. I must be missing something?
That’s fair, it’s not for everyone.
It makes your notes persistent, as guaranteed as you can guarantee that the relay is running. Plus if you’ve got a Pi or btc node running full time, it’s a no-cost no-brainer.
In my case, I installed the umbrel app, and I will keep my umbrel running either way, because I want a bitcoin node to run transactions through and for being yet another full-copy backup of the blockchain to propagate.
Fair enough, but any internet facing service is potentially another attack vector. If someone compromised your Umbrel node through a vulnerability in the nostr relay, your sats would be at risk.
Sure well there could be a theoretical global catastrophic EMP attack and everything will be lost. But the idea is redundancy so that somewhere it survives, your writing survives.
Sure. If we suffer a global catastrophic EMP attack then a) my relay would probably be hit, and b) my Nostr notes is the last thing I’ll care about
The fact that each umbrel app is running inside of a discrete docker container doesn’t mitigate this?
Only partially. Docker containers only provide partial separation. It’s not like a VM. Your container shares kernel with the host. There have been numerous other container escape vulnerabilities throughout the years as well.
This is my reasoning as well. Also, relays currently don’t communicate with each other so you setting up another relay doesn’t really strength the collective network.
I think with time we will see new use cases around relays as various services are built on top of nostr.
Umbrel has a fairly simple relay app that works as a backup and looks cool. I think EmbassyOS has a relay app I believe with a lot more options. Would you recommend any of those? What’s your raspberry pie setup like?