Oh no the idea itself is phenomenal. I was mostly joking making the point about the insidiousness of caching servers.
Discussion
Since you're smart and I have your attention, what is the positive trade off you get with caching server? Speed? It's slower for me vs Damus...
I know Matt's no fool, so genuinely curious to know what he'd say but don't like to get involved in disputes I don't belong in (just watch from sidelines like a creep)
This has been mentioned in dispatches:
nostr:note1fea45tfldz9kxc6jx395k42lskmcwccv4z3jv8eksj4l7kyvdtkqmvuxq3
So it is speed. I then just wonder why it's slower for me when I test.
I don't wanna drum up any drama, not today for sure, but that's my experience
Yeh, I love Jumble on desktop, but it can be slow because it's directly talking to the numerous different relays used by the various npubs.
Talking to multiple relays isn't inherently slow, but you might come across a slow relay once in a while, or perhaps an unavailable one.
Caching or indexing relays can help, but you need to be careful how to implement them in terms of synchronisation or authority delegation.
Beyond this, my theoretical knowledge expires 😂
This sounds like real knowledge to me, not theoretical at all!
Thanks. Think the picture is clearer now. Learned the term "intelligent edge", it means pushing compute to device or "edge" of network. Still puzzled why primal struggles with speed just enough for me to be noticeably annoying, but moving on for today as my brain is full. Other clients I've tried are prob even a bit slower, and primal did seem to work best when I was traveling and getting such bad signal Damus wouldn't even load anything up.
I'm not extremely knowledgeable about this, so take this all with a grain of salt, but i'll write some nonsense that comes to mind (also, I pretty much respond to any notification i see - especially from npubs i've known for a while - and I don't get enough to not see them):
- wider reach without murdering the edge device. the remote caching server could potentially connect to hundreds of remote relays and your edge device only connects to this single remote caching server.
- this one is contentious, but: filtering. depending on whether you think this is good or bad, a centralized server can use a lot of user statistics and behavior to filter spam or otherwise "undesirable" content (personally not a fan)
- ordering/promotion: largely similar to above. the cache server can determine what order you see posts in, how often you see notes from a given user, etc. etc. (personally not a fan)
- heavy computation: like nostr:npub12262qa4uhw7u8gdwlgmntqtv7aye8vdcmvszkqwgs0zchel6mz7s6cgrkj alluded to recently, the "caching server" (really stretching this term now) can perform high-resource or long-running computations that your client can simply read "for free"
- probably other stuff but those come to mind are are probably most relevant to the wider discussion at the moment.
For the ones I'm "not a fan of", I think those general patterns are very good things, but I don't think we have the proper WoT and personal server infrastructure yet to achieve it in a way that doesn't move us backwards in terms of decentralization and content moderation/censorship. These are the sorts of features that everyone wants for good reason, but if "we give it to them" in a half-assed way, I believe we diminish the chances of ever achieving it in the full-assed way. (mostly due to user complacency. the internet repeats this cycle over and over)
Still reading remainder, but had to pause and laugh at first bit. Relatable
- reach: nostr.land aggregator can do this
- filter: nostr.land aggregator will be able to do this as the only relay, OR if clients add support for a filtering signaling NIP
- reordering: aggregator can’t do this
- precomputing stats: this will be supported via COUNT I think
Great answer! Thank you