Yeah, pigeon is exactly a reverse proxy service
Discussion
well, the app you want to build is something i've thought about for a long time
yes, it's a reverse proxy and tunnel server, and the clients relay will be a tunnel client and listen to that endpoint in addition
it doesn't have to be wireguard, it could just as easily be plain old TLS but the auth part will be annoying, and you have to issue the certs to the client to auth with, wireguard is just simpler
the two things you need are an accounting system to track subscriptions, payment rails to authorise updating the subscritpion records, and something that generates them their custom relay subdomain
i figured it would make sense to also throw in nip-05 auth into it as well, so that is always online on your server
i think it could be reasonably profitable and it enables a lot of decentralization, with a bunch of competing services running this thing and people using clients with outbox, it would be a lot closer to decentralized than the free relay model of the committee of dev payoors
Pigeon consists of two parts:
- pigeon_nest: A reverse proxy service deployed on a server.
- pigeon: A local client that forwards messages between the local relay and pigeon_nest.
Pigeon communicates with pigeon_nest via websocket. Upon connection, it performs a NIP-42 auth and uses the pubkey as the relay address. I've already deployed pigeon_nest on my server, you can compile pigeon and give it a try: https://github.com/CodyTseng/pigeon/tree/master/pigeon
Here's my local relay:
wss://proxy.nostr-relay.app/4de3d1195084605b44638f816d1e787ee984e1751001a659396466173c787bb9
I also see this project having potential as a paid service, similar to ngrok
i'm very glad to see someone actually doing this, i just didn't have the time
outbox model and webof trust open up so much possibilities, it's quite mindboggling how much potential there is and how it seems like so many people in nostr dev don't get it