Is your relay completely custom? Or is there an existing relay implementation which restricts read access to authorized users in the way that you've demonstrated? I'm looking at nip 42 implementations and finding that they usually about restricting write access rather than read access. Or maybe I've misunderstood. I would truly appreciate your input!
Discussion
All of our NIP-42 stuff is custom. Most paid relays only restrict write access but not through NIP-42, just by keeping a pubkey whitelist or other restrictions.
I believe the rust nostr relay has a NIP-42 implementation but I haven’t used it.
Thanks for the fast reply Mazin, so cool. I think I have that rust relay up and running. Docs make me wonder if the NIP-42 implementation is focussed on write rather than read. If you have custom rolled yours, was stirfry your starting point? Do you have any plans to share or license your code? I am not sure what's involved in that, I am just trying to figure out an entry point to explore further.
We use strfry for our relay backends. For AUTH that is on connect (not for a specific type of REQ) we have a fairly simple custom websocket that sits in-between. Once the user passes AUTH, you can simply connect them to strfry.
For more complicated types of access control, the middleware becomes a lot more complex as it needs to parse each request. Strfry will eventually have NIP-42 built in - it is often discussed in the strfry telegram as a desired feature. The truth is it’s a complicated spec to implement for anything outside of “on connection” and for that use case it’s a poor solution (a header would be better, more like NIP-98).
I’ve ranted about this before but ultimately it’s not going to change and I’ve embraced NIP-42 for the time being.
Thank you so much!