Nostr Web Client

For Nostr to work I should be able to run a shitty relay on a $3 VPS just to post my own notes and my followers should be able to talk to it. Currently there are dozens of hundred-dollar powerful-machine relays out there and they are all being killed by the DDoS of queries.

Clients must get smarter and automatically know how to find people and fetch their posts even if they are on a shitty relay in the dark corners of the internet.

Once that happens, then it will make sense for the network to scale horizontally, for people to spread around multiple relays instead of always gravitating towards the central set of the same relays where everybody is.

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Discussion

fiatjaf 2y ago

As I write this I wonder who is going to read and if I am posting to one of the central relays.

Cameri🐦‍🔥 2y ago

I can’t read this message. 😆

fiatjaf 2y ago

Related: #[0]

Derek Ross 2y ago

I agree, but also under this model if I follow 500 people then I'd have to add 500 relays. 40 relays made Nostr incredibly slow for me. What would 500 do?

Carlito 2y ago

This is why clients need to get smarter though. You don't necessarily need to connect to all relays at the same time, in the background a client could be rotating through a list, connecting and disconnecting at different times, and making other decisions on when and what to connect to.

fiatjaf 2y ago

How is https://github.com/BrightonBTC/bija doing it currently?

Carlito 2y ago

It's horrible right now TBH, it just connect to everything. but it's high on my priority list of what to work on.

fiatjaf 2y ago

And yet it is faster than all the web clients.

That gives you a measure of how shitty the web is.

nakad.ai🔱🦁🛡️🏯📿 2y ago

#[2] has done alot to improve performance on iris.

But its a good idea to run your own relay so that you truly own your data.

fiatjaf 2y ago

jack 2y ago

Keep The Relays Shitty Committee

Matt Lorentz 2y ago

Let's spin up a distributed hash table that maps public keys to the relays they use. Make sure it's accessible via tor and only the user who owns the pubkey can update their record in the table. This is better than NIP-05 because it isn't tied to the centralized DNS system, and better than NIP-02 contact lists because it works for people who don't use any of the same relays you do.

fiatjaf 2y ago

Not a bad idea. I am skeptical of DHTs, but happy to be proven wrong. Please build it. Ideally inject it into an existing client and make it work. There will be a bounty for sure.

Techpriest Baunach 2y ago

Yeah, we need more decentralization. What would be even cooler is desktop clients that run a personal relay in the background. Just like Bitcoin Core or the Monero GUI wallet.

Alexandre de Moraes 2y ago

I remember that Elixir/Erlang is very good for this.

A company had needed 200 servers for their old codebase, and when switching to Elixir they needed only one.

Also WhatsApp handled 2 Million users (I Believe)using Erlang.

And also remember that DDOS attacks will be used intentionally by some countries as a censorship technique, so you better be prepared for that.

atyh 2y ago

remember.

nostr:note1sh4snfp8wklwx9aculku8q4e5h9mg2dnpxp5gs3mvakmqm9q2drs9kx5sk

Shawn 2y ago

See my notes on sponsored relays from about a month ago. This is what I’m working towards:

nostr:note142lv6f0d900cqmsm8faggzrnqw270vgea88x5vlc8n7av67hmtssrav9za

Nice and Kind Vic 2y ago

I totally agree with this.

Im budget constrained and spend about 7 USD per month on cloud services. I can take that up a little but I cant afford an AWS or Google bill of hundreds a month

nostr:nevent1qqsgt6cf5snht0hrz7uw0mwrs2u6tja59xesnq6yggakwmdsdjs9x3cppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0qgsrhuxx8l9ex335q7he0f09aej04zpazpl0ne2cgukyawd24mayt8grqsqqqqqp7cy9z3