It's 1AM and green text scrolls across your face as you groove and zap memes and to the sound of cypherpunk stems. It's been too long. Your friends should have replied by now. Then you smell microchips... and burning flesh.
What's going on? Did you get blocked for too many #NostrMemes? Is your phone mining? Nah, you're just having relay problems.
What IS up with relays? We see them in settings, we hear some are paid, we know we need them but do we have too many? How much relaying is too much? Normally you wouldn't care but this is getting serious.
Grab an ice pack, take a purplepill and stay tuned for a bonus insight!
# How many relays do you need?
If you're on mobile you've probably felt Nostr's phone-warming effect and so you may want to prune down to just a few relays. You won't get every single note but you'll save battery until you make it back to your laptop, or a charging cable. Pro-tip: Many clients let you disable AND re-enable relays without removing them.
If instead you want your very own Nostr Operations Center then order power, cooling, add in a case of GPUs for your AI, then visit nostr.watch to link up.
While you're waiting for the components to arrive, feast your eyes on these other reasons to tune your relay selections.
# Paid relays
Our infrastructure needs more capacity if it's going to handle the next Twitter eXodus. One way to pay for it is by purchasing service. Paid relays help keep spammers out and some like cellar.nostr.wine have begun to offer long-term storage for money.
# Search
As nostr grows, you're going to want search its vast oceans of content. Since this can add cost to existing volunteer operations, the search function is probably best handled by specialty relays.
# Other content types
New kinds are being invented all the time so if you're a developer or early adopter, and in 2023 who isn't, you should be prepared to join relays for long-form, for video and streaming, and perhaps for privacy.
If you'd like to interact with networks based on Mastodon/ActivityPub consider adding a bridge relay.
If you are multilingual you may want to add relays to stay current. nostr.watch's map view is great for this. A VPN may be required.
# Bonus insight
Finally we get to the insight. You didn't skip did you?
Nostr's relay architecture suffers from something called the common neighbor requirement. This means if you and I want to communicate we need to share at least one relay. Efficient relay selection is an interesting problem that needs more attention. I suspect solutions will require statistics, modeling, and a lot of coffee. Who knows? Until then, your social circles could be hamming it up on exclusive sets of nonadjacent relays. We wouldn't want that would we?
Another way around common neighbor is to reach out to everyone we know and tell them our npubs. It may be a long read but call it a bonding experience. Or we could have them scan our QR codes. Either way.
