Yeah having an api for an indexer service thats connected to all relays will make it much more efficient for things like that and 'relay auto pilot'
Discussion
I’ve been messing with the indexer idea for a slightly different couple reasons. 1. Censorship resistance and 2. Pretty soon relays will start purging events (we will hit sane VPS storage limits, or even just casual user database sizes of 100GB+, which don’t maintain themselves. We will need better ways to find events that matter in clients.
And the other key reason then is: less data. An indexer can store just event id and relays known to have had it with a date stamp. It’s 1/20th of the size of an event (with content and signature and tags, etc). Nostr events may total 1-5+TB in a year - an indexer of 50-100GB perhaps.
I’ve built an indexer internally and have an API that’s as aggregator. It’s not finished and a little neglected, while I’ve been off.
However, I think we need an open source version too.
In the meta section you can see aggregated stats and seen by which relays.
Not sure if everyone switching to a centralized indexer is the solution a decentralized network needs but I’m glad there’s options. Is this indexer open source and something anyone can run?