I'm really wondering what it would take to run a Nostr relay.. I'm busy with life, and I worry it could be time consuming. Anyone have a good idea of how much time it takes to do a more than decent job? What about the computer? RAM etc, motherboard? What happens if our electricity goes down? Are there any part time relay operators? Thanks for any insights
Discussion
nostr:nprofile1qqsyh3uc938wgput9td9xs9wvul335ak5ejtr7t734nenes8fj6u88gprdmhxw309aex2mrp0yhxyarr9e5kuen09enkvw3cxqursqghwaehxw309anhymm4wpejuvrcvd5xzapwvdhk6qgdwaehxw309ahx7uewd3hkc4su5lj will say it requires sacrifice. A virgin sacrifice.
Not quite so bad, but never hurts to sacrifice a virgin. You can easily identify potential virgin victims on nostr by asking them if they run their own lightning node or not.
run an old laptop. use strfry from hoytech https://github.com/hoytech/strfry
don't waste your cash on vm or vps. just run an old machine or something and vpn tunnel it to protect your ip.
you can minimise your space requirements and the risk of storing unwanted material but setting the conf file to only store notes and not images/videos.
if this is too technically, you can run something like umbrelOS which is sort-of a homelab environment. It has one-click install options for a range of stuff from bitcoin/lightning nodes to nostr relay - if i recall i think they are using the rust relay, but i can't remember.
also, relays are simple dumb machines. all they do is send and receive notes. If its online, and requested, then it will send or receive. if it's offline, your not should already be on several other relays.
if you're really concerned about being censored, then run more than one relay to reduce the risk of one or more going offline at any given time.
For the most part, you can connect to anyone's relay so - yeah