Yeah I still donāt see it really. Iām not concerned about backup of my own notes- that seems pretty insignificant, at least to me personally. Iād totally be up for running a more robust public relay to support the protocol and allow other users to connect, transmit notes, and protect free speech etc. But if itās only personal use, there are already a decent number of public relays- and there will likely always be new ones. If I connect to a large enough number of them, it seems my notes have very little chance of being censored by all of them? And even if they do, I can just whip up a new key pair in seconds. I must be missing something?
Discussion
Thatās fair, itās not for everyone.
It makes your notes persistent, as guaranteed as you can guarantee that the relay is running. Plus if youāve got a Pi or btc node running full time, itās a no-cost no-brainer.
In my case, I installed the umbrel app, and I will keep my umbrel running either way, because I want a bitcoin node to run transactions through and for being yet another full-copy backup of the blockchain to propagate.
Fair enough, but any internet facing service is potentially another attack vector. If someone compromised your Umbrel node through a vulnerability in the nostr relay, your sats would be at risk.
Sure well there could be a theoretical global catastrophic EMP attack and everything will be lost. But the idea is redundancy so that somewhere it survives, your writing survives.
Sure. If we suffer a global catastrophic EMP attack then a) my relay would probably be hit, and b) my Nostr notes is the last thing Iāll care about
The fact that each umbrel app is running inside of a discrete docker container doesnāt mitigate this?
Only partially. Docker containers only provide partial separation. Itās not like a VM. Your container shares kernel with the host. There have been numerous other container escape vulnerabilities throughout the years as well.
This is my reasoning as well. Also, relays currently donāt communicate with each other so you setting up another relay doesnāt really strength the collective network.
I think with time we will see new use cases around relays as various services are built on top of nostr.