Nostr Web Client

I've tried to use https://minds.com/ as my main nostr client and account, but it failed because no client is watching the minds relay in their hardcoded list of relays (except maybe damus? I didn't try that)

in https://astral.ninja/ people would have to manually input the URL of the minds relay in the settings, other clients (https://alphaama.com/) don't even have settings for that. but it would have been a big hassle anyway.

this is why I think the npub/nshare/nprofile/whatever scheme for adding people along with optional relay URLs scheme is very important.

and that is also why I think clients should start thinking about grabbing relay URLs from event tags so they associate some relays with some users and use that when querying for new notes (i.e. don't try to query notes from a minds user from the wellorder relay and don't try to grab notes from a random user from the minds relay).

how do you see this situation?

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Discussion

jb55 3y ago

maybe we should really encourage nip05 adoption with relay hints in there. it's the easiest way to share pubkeys and has optimal UX. We're making our lives harder by trying to fit this all in a binary bech32 format.

maybe long term we would want something smarter but nip05 might be the easiest and friendliest route for now. minds should be able to implement that for their users. we just need more nip05 providers.

jb55 3y ago

so the first step is to spec relay hints in nip05

Mike Dilger ☑️ 3y ago

I started drafting a NIP for issue 70 to put relays in nip05. Maybe I could finish the draft and issue it as a pull request for comments.

But I see 2 other issues: some people don't want to be associated with a doman, and current clients aren't always doing the right thing.

jb55 3y ago

if they don't want to be associated with a domain they can just give their pubkey and relay to their friend over signal or something. most people don't care and just want nice ux.

jb55 3y ago

not saying we shouldn't do relay metadata in npub/nprofiles but I think we could do both. nip05 thing would be an easy first thing to do.

balas 3y ago

the thing about relays in URLs is, what relay should the client include? just a random relay from the list? the first? always use the same?

balas 3y ago

* relays in tags..

balas 3y ago

the probability of relays we include in notes today of beeing down in the future is very high, so not sure it really makes sense to do that, it will be mostly bloat in some years time..

Mike Dilger ☑️ 3y ago

Remember all the relays for a user. 1. If you are already listening to a relay in the user's list, use that one. Otherwise just pick one. 2. If the one you picked is down, choose another.

fiatjaf 3y ago

a random relay should be fine. more fancy implementations could count all events from a user they have gotten from each relay and use the one with the most. even fancier would be a count that takes timestamps into accounts (so they can detect if a user has moved between relays).

I don't know, it's probably good to have a little bit of chaos in these things, just don't spread misinformation about relays.