A myth in nostr is that if one relay goes down 3 spring up. This is an irrational myth. Observation is closer to the opposite. If 3 relays go down, one new one starts. Continuing that trend leads to a small set of centralized relays, which most people will use.
Discussion
I probably won’t be running my own relay(s) until 4 or 5 my close family and friends join onto the nostr network by their own accord. At that point I would setup a relay at my home and ask them if I could setup relays at their homes… to make sure our communications are solid amongst ourselves. Then I would need to be able to easily filter out a lot of traffic to keep my upload under the ISP cap.
#ditto might be the solution for you https://soapbox.pub/ditto/
Skimmed the installation page and happy to see it doesn’t use docker! So Ditto runs on top of Soapbox?
other way round, soapbox is one front end for #ditto, but you can use any nostr app or mastodon app too -- however soapbox is probably the best
you can try it here : https://ditto.pub
its the only client I use now
i wrote a reverse proxy that you can run on a cheap VPS that with a domain name with the wildcard configured on the DNS service configuration, combined with a wireguard connection, allows you to expose your home relay to the internet:
https://github.com/mleku/realy/tree/dev/cmd/lerproxy
my relay is now working very nicely, has an automated access control that allows everyone in your follow list to read and write from the relay, you only need to put your npub hex into the configuration and publish your follow list to it and voila
still need to do a lot more work on all of these things but i think that people would pay for being able to run a relay on their computer that everyone in their friends list can automatically use (just need to make the deployment a bit simpler so it automatically fetches the follow list by scouring the open relays)
i think i will try to focus on making everything needed to do this... even, maybe bake this reverse proxy into the relay so you literally just DM the relay bot, set your subdomain username, and zap it and it sets up a wireguard client and on the client side the relay lets you drop that wireguard client config in and the relay automatically connects up to it and listens for stuff
a lot to do but i know all the pieces required, it's just some time to make it happen
i'm planning on building a full local relay and a small web service that interacts via nostr that enables anyone to run a relay on their own pc so they can use a client like nostrudel or coracle with inboxes set up, to have others also using inbox clients to directly store messages in their relay
you are not bullish enough on what is possible with relay architecture
> you are not bullish enough on what is possible with relay architecture
Lol, yes, I'm gonna need a bot that replies this to about 80% of posts around here 😹
I know exactly what is possible. I am neither bullish nor bearish, I use it as a tool. And so should you. Relays are a tool to relays notes and other stuff, from one user to another. It's not a database. It's not a storage system. Let nostr be nostr and all your problems are solved.
i'm helping define what noster be