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Topical relays 👇

nostr:note1jkkdwtlgf2cthuhd6c7qdptyqaxv9m80qteq7gx47t4qws65u9rq6thn3w

What if nostr:npub1acg6thl5psv62405rljzkj8spesceyfz2c32udakc2ak0dmvfeyse9p35c could write his thoughts on this conflict on a relay that is dedicated to these themes, and instead of having to attempt to compartmentalize in this way, the conversation would naturally trend towards such relay.

Not interested in it? Don't connect to the relay.

Ofc, all clients fall short of making this UX possible. But the protocol allows it and we should build software that enables it.

But how do you handle the aggregation, syncing and re-writing of events? I noticed that a lot of things *eventually* end up on nos.lol or one of the nostr.band relays one way or another, which is kinda interesting. Also, caching servers like Primal will just lump all events from all relays together into one big mass.

I like the idea of topic-oriented or community-focused relays a lot (because it would make it easier to "get rid" of some topics) but right now, Nostr is very small and surprisingly interconnected - indirectly, through syncs and rewrites.

So rather than making relays "enforce" a topic, what if we took more advantage of tags? For instance, instead of just a regular hashtag, we could add a literal Topic tag, allowing the post to have a soft-heading. Future clients could allow you to then not just follow that user, but maybe just show events related to a topic. You shouldn't have too many topics, naturally, but if you use the same npub for updates of your app and your personal thoughts... you have two clear topics. Now a user might chose to only see your app updates, but not your personal thoughts - whilst another user wants to see both.

This approach would allow the syncing and rewriting to continue as it is right now, be backwards compatible (since it is just an extra tag) to older clients but still offer clients to implement this feature just fine - and it would also still be optional.

Unfortunately... that is the best I ever came up with in regards to this :/ It feels a little underwhelming but... yeah, that's what I got. o.o

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Discussion

Ya I don't really get the Twitter paradigm. Look how it pushes people to have a whole account dedicated to a single thing, and they're afraid to say anything to 'loose their following'. It's broken. Nostr can do better. Nostr is not just a Twitter ban refuge, it's pandoras box that will change the way we use the internet.

Topics require human curation to be useful (and possibly AI assistance) but at the end of the day, a human decides if something is on topic or not.

Hashtags are not good enough by themselves, but super close.. if a relay team decided to curate some hashtags, and delete off topic spam posts for example, *and then a client were to specify which relay(s) to follow a hashtag from, then all of a sudden you could have a feed of that topic that would be close to on topic. There could be multiple relay teams doing this, and you have topic merging but still no spam.

Anyway, I may have said it before but I like reddit/irc/group chat a lot more than I like Twitter. So I'm interested in relays supporting this use case.

There is already a "subject" tag supported in many clients, it's in some NIP number I forgot.

This doesn't work for the goals above, though.