What does multiplexing mean in this context?
Discussion
One relay connects, in turn, to many others, aggregating their notes, as well as propagating notes it receives to them.
I feel like you might be able to help me understand this... where do your notes "live". For example, if I disconnect from ALL relays... do the notes all die?
In other words, how does my private key "store" the notes and info? And where?
Thanks in advance.
I’ll try. 😅
Your notes live on any relay to which you’re connected at the time you post it. We can assume that for some period, each of those relays will retain your notes “on disk” until such time as the relay expires those notes based on a defined retention policy (i.e. X days or Y terabytes of storage consumed), or, of course, the relay shuts down.
But as far as I know, no standard approach yet exists, so we must assume at this early stage that our notes are ephemeral.
Thanks Shawn. This is so interesting! I was wondering if the relays stored the info for an indeterminate time period in case you choose to re-connect with them.
I still have so many more questions.
Hahaha.
So much fun to learn this computing theory.
Ah, so what i’ve been referring to as streaming/mirrored relays basically! I’m looking forward to seeing more and more relays with that functionality.
I like this idea as well. I think NVK is calling them buffer relays. I can imagine having a self hosted relay that is connected to x number of relays and aggregating notes and filtering out unwanted content. When I am on mobile I only need to connect to my self hosted relay. Now I am only retrieving data I am interested in while on mobile.
This was my next question. If you are connected to one relay... does it aggregate with others and share info.
The question begs tho of how much "power" or ownership /control does a relay have ove the content a user creates.
This leads me to think the BEST way to utilize Nostr would be to host your own relay or maybe figure it out with a few people you trust and want to manage together.
Only relays that have multiplexing/mirroring do that, like wss://relay.nostrgaph.net and wss://nos.lol
power/ownership in what sense?