Relay feeds not all that exciting tbh. Same content all across from same people mostly
Discussion
what relays you browsing? i see a lot of variety in the ones that i use
I don’t know now I removed them - whatever the ones jumble served by default.
I didn’t see the point yet, but it’s still the primary explore method on x21.
It’s mostly bitcoin content. Relay names don’t give any hints as to what you’re going to find. On Reddit the subreddit name is actually useful, here we have weird ass long relay names.
A relay is not a community and follows no rules for the most part (I’ve seen some exceptions like thankful relay). I don’t know why they should have priority if content is not organized by anything
relays can have a name, description, and metadata about poasting rules, payments, supported nips, etc. these are underutilized. the fact that most client hide relays has hindered the development of relay as a service solutions, topic - based relays and so on. the success of Jumble shows that many people are happy using relay feeds and the UX can be pretty nice. many people are familiar with the servers/workspaces metaphor like in Discord or Slack.
I mean, I looked at them an hour ago and they are still random weird names. It’s not a good user experience at all. The fact that they are even called relays and show which nips they support etc and have reviews is all nonsensical to anyone who hasn’t been here for 2 years. It could be great but I don’t see any real effort or implementation that would make them a good experience. All of the positives I’ve heard have been from nostr power users who understand how nostr works.
If relay browsing is so great then it’ll grow in usage and I have nothing against that. I just hope it becomes more clear what each relay does, and why people should even look at that specific one. We still have a long way I think. Let’s see more relay first clients.
Relay feeds will be so beneficial when the idea is more widely embraced. The possibilities are endless. A lack of ways to interface disincentivizes people from trying to create unique feeds. That's getting better because of clients like Jumble & Nosotros.
I tried to start a cooking magazine style relay based around chicken soup with Relay Tools. It worked pretty well, but the content just doesn't exist yet. So, now it's streaming 20 popular hashtags filtered by my graperank WoT. It's not unique content, but it's clean. I think that's the first battle, trying to bridge the gap between the sometimes stale or empty follow feed/lists & the wide open "global" that scares people away. I think that was sort of the point of the defaults in Jumble, a few safe feeds for onboarding. wss://relays.land/spatianostra should be something anyone feels comfortable stumbling upon. When that dilemma is under control, people can start curating in other ways. There's still a lot to do. Some aspects are underutilized, like naming conventions & explanations. That'll come as niches are filled. Relay software is getting to a point that I can run it (which says a lot lol). That opens up the possibility for anyone to start curating anything.
When users learn how to interact with & manage their relays, whether that be operating, browsing, or writing, they'll start learning to manage their own censorship resistance, which I guess is the whole point.
Yeah, that’s true for now. I think it’s kinda a chicken-and-egg thing — without clients that actually show relay feeds, there’s no reason for relays to do anything different.
Once more clients support browsing relay feeds, we’ll probably start seeing some relays focused on community governance.
Our clients are smart enough already, it’s time for relays to get smart too.
Aggregation is trivial. Orly has a feature that spiders everywhere and subscribes for events from every follow of designated admin npubs. If a client sends to another relay first, orly says it already has it.
