I was always a fan of relay feeds, but especially now with 100% of my old clients broken that were using the following feeds, I'm doubling down on relay feeds.
I also have a strfry-router script, that takes my follows, and creates a following feed using outbox technique (30 or so relays greedy algo). Then I connect to that and BOOM, my old following feed is back in action for easy browse from a single local relay, just incase I start to miss it. Which I did a little bit.
embracing the nostr. i have a suspicion that nostr:npub180cvv07tjdrrgpa0j7j7tmnyl2yr6yr7l8j4s3evf6u64th6gkwsyjh6w6 had something like this in mind when designing it.
relays feeds don't make sense. Relays are just to store our notes and nothing else. I joined your relay because it was cheap not because I wanted to be part of your relay.
Everyone is joining relays with that same reason. They should just make us enter out country, hobby etc. to our profiles then we can use that event to see "country" feeds etc
How do you find new people to follow?
I know you're not a fan of relay feeds. But I think your fear of them is mis-guided.
I don't understand why you want relay feeds? Why would I want to follow users from your relay? Your relay is just a relay to connect to, I don't see anything special about your relay and I also don't see that your relay is a specific topic, so it's just random people.
I'm not afraid of relay feeds, I'm just saying there might be another a better way to follow a specific topic.
The only way to follow new people right now is when someone boosts or quotes their note. There's no way to find new people. We need Facebook type search feature where you can find a user by country, city, hobbies etc
How did you find anyone to follow? Like, originally.
The relay you subscribed to, you're right, it has no real special purpose it's the first relay I ever ran, and it's one of the last OG relays that just kindof accept anyone who wants to post there given they pay or are in one of my lists. Quite honestly, I think about turning it off or re-purposing it sometimes. But it has some fans, like you, that use it, so I don't.
When I first joined nostr, I had to look at relay feeds to find people because my follow list is ZERO. And I still do this, TO THIS DAY. Does that make sense? Did you join from primal or something where they bootstrapped your follow list for you?
When I first got on nostr, i saw people on Twitter/X posting about nostr and their pub. I followed a couple of those npubs, they always quote or boost notes so I followed those npubs as well. That's pretty much the only way to find users.
Why would you turn off your relay? It's being used by people to store their notes. What did you want from the relay? I get the feeling you want relays to be a "community", almost like a forum.
I like your relay because it's a paid relay so there isn't that much spammers, but I see it mostly as a store of my notes and a backup of my notes.
You finding people on your relay is good but you're only doing that because there's no other easy way to find new people, you don't necessarily have anything in common with them.
It was difficult for us the beginners but more difficult for you since you've been here longer, but for new users in the future, it will be easier because normally people look up their friends or companies they like and follow them.
Didn't amethyst already have relay feeds? I remember before the newest update, There was an icon and you could turn off all relays except the ones you wanted. I didn't find anything special about the relay feeds. It was just a bunch of random people who spoke different types of languages. It's not a good way to find others because people join relays simply to store their notes not because the relay is a certain type of relay.
At least with countries, city, hobby feeds, we can find users who share the same interests as us.
That's what made Facebook the king of social media is that fact that we could easily search for people via hobby, cities, school, etc.
Facebook never had country or city feeds other then your friends feeds but apps like Hello Talk do and it is amazing way to find new people.
I do see relays as communities yes, but not in the way you might think, more in an augmented way. Even just paying 21 sats, that's a community. It's people that paid 21 sats, all sharing a relay's infrastructure.
There is value in this, for when you want to discover stuff, you could use that relay for example, and AT LEAST it's full of people that paid or were somehow added. vs. if you try to do this on a big free relay, it's not a good experience at all.
Then since that works so well, there are many other things you can do to make those experiences even better.
maybe you know your community more then me but I joined simply because it was cheap and it can store my notes as a backup. I'm not sure who the other users on your relay are. I never go on your relay website.
I checked it I don't understand what the topic is. I used chatgpt and it said it's original gangster California. I'm not sure what that means.
I remember reading last year that people were setting up relays and even naming them in the same way as forums and we're hoping to get users to join their relays depending on the relay'a topic. Kinda like mastodon too where the insurances have a specific topic.
That's not the direction nostr will go. The direction nostr will go is exactly like Ditto pub software and amethyst. This means people will go on a website login with their npub and view their following feeds, or use a client like amethyst and view their feed.
Very few people will want to go on a website called nostr cats and view only profiles related to cats. A community of cats. That's almost like mastodon. Then they admin will be able to ban you and it's centralized.
Amethyst does have communities. There is a tab for it. That works much better. The ditto pub software needs to add those communities to it as well.
I believe the direction nostr is going is to give the user the most power, while limiting power to administrators to have communities on their websites.
Relays will be useful but simply to store the notes synced across all relays. In fact the newest amethyst puts less emphasis on adding removing relays.
heh, ok sure. see ya in 2023 nostr then.
if you want to see the whole country chatting thing with no relay maintenance or anything, try bitchat.
How do you sort events by country, hobby, etc?
You can't right now. It's not possible. I'm saying they should add those type of feeds.
Relay.tools currently enables you to create a hobby-specific feed by keying on hobby-specific hashtags and using the WOA feature to keep out spam. By the time nostr:npub1healthsx3swcgtknff7zwpg8aj2q7h49zecul5rz490f6z2zp59qnfvp8p's WoT hackathon is over, you’ll be able to add a list of hobby-specific authors curated in real time by your grapevine. How does that sound?
yes that sounds good but why do I need to go on that website to do it, why can't I just add my country on my client like amethyst and then it will just give me country feed.
The client is where the power is, not so much someone's website
All you need is someone to create a relay focused on the country or topic you’re interested in, then you add that relay to your relay list and you use it on any client.
Or a client could maintain a list of available country-specific relays, have a button for each one, you click your country of interest and the client knows which relay to point to. You could basically channel surf.
The more I think about it, the more I think these features of nostr:nprofile1qqsykd7klhautcjugml3jewuhtlw8zw04dl54tcdmw5m5vggk37ax3qpzfmhxue69uhkummnw3eryvfwvdhk6tcpr9mhxue69uhhxatswphhyapwdehhxarjxyhxxmmd9usvdssu are awesome and underutilized.
Why does it need to be specific relays? A better solution would be for NOSTR to introduce a NIP where users can specify their country, state, city, etc., and this info gets propagated across all relays. That way, we wouldn’t rely on just one relay; every relay would have the same data. If one relay goes down, the info is still available on others. This eliminates the need for country-specific relays entirely.
Relays are just a place to store our notes and data, relays are not going to become a community
I don’t think it’s feasible for every relay to have every note. Or even every note of a given kind. Too much traffic will make them slow, so best case scenario is that we would end up being a victim of our own success. Different relays can serve distinct purposes. That’s one of the great things about nostr.
That's because the free relays allow anyone to connect and the scammers and bots fill up the hard drive and slow it down.
The paid relays don't fill up very fast and are quite fast because it's only users that are willing to pay. The future is paid relays for npubs that are serious about using nostr.
Every relay right now has the kind 0 data and we are fine. The only relays that purge their data is the free relays.
I see what you mean. Yes we can have different reays but I'm sure eventually the direction nostr will go is less powe to the relays and more power to the client.
I vote to give more power to the end user.
If I see Alice has N “verified” followers on one client, I want to see the same N on all clients — otherwise I have no idea what to do with the number. Which means the metrics like verified followers are personalized to me, calculated using the method that I select, and they follow me wherever I go on nostr. Which means less power to the clients.
