Is there anybody *not* connected to at least one paid relay at this point? Any holdouts? I'm curious.
Discussion
Not yet on a paid relay - just haven’t got around to it yet …
Right now I’m on Damus and the relays I’m connected to are all free. And I’m not getting any spam (I don’t really look at the global public feed). So if one of the first incentives of a paid relay is to reduce spam, I’m already spam-free, so I have less of an incentive.
Yeah the clients have mostly stopped showing Global from public relays. The issue is if public relays continue to be overrun by spam they won't be able to maintain performance without some kind of external funding, which goes back to the current model issue with big tech and social media. If it's not grass roots funded, you're beholden to the funders. Either that or the public relays will just die out because there's no incentive to maintain them due to all the spam.
The other question I have is this: If I add paid relays, and they come to the same feed as the free ones, how will I know which notes are coming from where? How can I appreciate the work the relay operator is doing to keep spam out of my feed, or deliver notes that are interesting to me if i can’t tell where specific notes come from ? I still haven’t figured this part out, but seems a great opportunity for simple UX to show which feed a specific note comes from. Although now that I think of it - I’m connected to 10 free relays - and when I send a note, which relays is delivering that note? All of the relays?
NostrGram will show you the relays a note was seen on, but it takes a couple of clicks (one on the ellipsis below the note and another on the Note Info icon). In theory if you're connected to 10 free relays and they're all receiving the writes then they're all indexing your notes.
I still only use free relays.
yeah all the noobs who find no 🫂
clients defaulting their discovery feed to a read only paid relays definitely help them reach out to real people, but some educational copy should be written to explain why they won’t appear in that feed yet and encourage them start your journey by replying to things.
For the time being most people writing to paid relays also write to the public ones, and multiple clients read from paid and public (just not on Global), so new folks who are only using public relays will still be seen and interacted with. But the public relays need to figure out the spam problem or they won't last. It's a tough problem to be sure (I battle with it to keep NostrGram's database from being overloaded by it) but unless a solid solution is forthcoming they'll get buried in spam.
Just waiting to put in some proper homework on a paid relays. Also want to have a try at running a private relay.
The two I recommend the most are eden.nostr.land (run by #[2] who wrote the server) and nostr.wine (run by #[3] and coded by #[4]) who've done a ton of innovating with their relays.
I’ve also found one for #AUStriches run out of Sydney
relay.nostr.com.au
Really want to see if I can get the global feed to be useful with only paid relays
If you use NostrGram and only have paid relays in your list you can use the Friends+ feed to see who you're following *and* who *they* follow in one feed. It widens the graph so you get a lot more interaction without the spam. On the Following feed there's also a "Follow Suggestions" button that loads the people most followed by the people you follow. Gives you lots of good ideas for new folks to follow.
I don’t follow any paid relays, but I have taken the position of “follow all the relays”, I look at profiles and add all of the interesting users relays.
See my other post stating I think 1sat is all it takes as an entrance fee to produce a spam free relay. I might do this just to test…
note12nls5rsarlkmhdk3d5ft87n7x4sgzx2jg0y6phv4sr4yspvtr6tsw0l5ch
I haven't. I use iris.to when I want to look at the public feed and it has minimal spam.
I don't believe I am. But i didnt know they existed. What are the benefits?