Replying to Avatar Silberengel

I guess running a relay is a bit like running a Lightning node. Most people won't do it, but enough will, that everyone can use theirs and pay them (with love or money 😅 ).

A database is more like transacting on-chain. It's more persistent and secure, and allows for more complex data analysis, but costs more and is a higher hurdle because you're writing to/from the core data storage system.

I expect that there will be more LN nodes than Bitcoin nodes and more relays than Nostr-DBs, but I see viable uses cases for both.
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Silberengel 1y ago

I can see DBs for aggregators, for instance, so that you can version events without having to keep all revisions live, and do complex queries/computation on other hardware, and just serve up the results as vector embeddings.

Also allows you to store events off-relay and then pass them to the relay when only certain npubs send a request. Tighter access-control and a protective layer against hacking. You could also move the data one layer back and have multiple relays pulling from one source, and control what they are each allowed to pull and for whom. Then a relay is like a query server that only runs a subset of queries, which allows for query optimization.

It could get pretty wild 🤯 .

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Melvin Carvalho 1y ago

Or you could just say that relays are for relaying messages, and everything else goes in the DB. There is no serious site on the internet that operates on a one-table one-column string database, and with a limited query lanaguage, at that. It's quite amazing what has been done with such a primitive, toylike, tool. But ultimately anything serious will need proper infrastructure.

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Silberengel 1y ago

Well, yeah, but most Nostr stuff isn't serious. The Serious People have all at least looked into adding databases.

Scriptkiddies aren't going to bother worrying about query optimization, complex filters, persistent versioning, and etc.

They're just like:

1) Use AI and NDK to make a buggy javascript client

2) Post note to internet over domain only paid through for 3 months

3)