Subnostr

Got my first relay set up using relay.tools by nostr:npub10npj3gydmv40m70ehemmal6vsdyfl7tewgvz043g54p0x23y0s8qzztl5h . Woot!

Relatively easy to set up. I love the configurability. Some of the options include:

- public or private

- free or paid

- keywords, tags, and pubkeys to include or block

Validation: I see there are at least ~ 30 searchable paying customers so far.

Here’s what I’m trying to figure out. For this to be a profitable business, who will be the customers? Businesses running RaaS (relays as a service)? Or everyday plebs?

If I wanted to run a RaaS, looks like this would be a super easy way to get it up and running quickly. So that seems a feasible model. Although I wonder how many customers like that exist. Probably not a lot. Enough to sustain relay.tools as a business? Maybe not.

As a pleb … why would I want this service? Maybe to have a guaranteed backup of the stuff I want. Nice to have. But do I NEED it? Not really.

So here’s the question: How do we turn a service like relay.tools into something every nostr user MUST HAVE?

cc:

nostr:npub12zqf55l7l9vsg5f6ssx5pq4f9dzu6hcmnepkm8ftj25fecy379jqkq99h8

nostr:npub1manlnflyzyjhgh970t8mmngrdytcp3jrmaa66u846ggg7t20cgqqvyn9tn

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Discussion

Tekkadan, ゲロゲロ! 🐸 1y ago

I just set up a bunch of my own relays with it. I'm running my own instance. NIP-42 auth makes relay.tools a no-brainer. Worked out some additional documentation for it too. Should be posted tomorrow. It leaves me hopeful for better relay configuration options.

david 1y ago

What additional relay configuration options would you like to see as a user?

Tekkadan, ゲロゲロ! 🐸 1y ago

Specifically on Amethyst and other clients. The ability to manage relay lists on mobile. On Damus you can't even use other relays which is why you only publish there. On Amethyst I can see which relays you have published to, as well as publish to many relays, or choose which to publish to.

nostr:nprofile1qqszrdqezqk63lqt4yzgftkfxjl4tdatea67akeezf8g6a0yj86p5hspzfmhxue69uhkummnw3eryvfwvdhk6tcpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhszrnhwden5te0dehhxtnvdakz7du7yvl has a bounty out for list support in amethyst so I'm hoping I can work that to my advantage and finally be able to customize my feeds from the app

david 1y ago

You can’t use other relays on damus?

𝕾𝖊𝖗 𝕾𝖑𝖊𝖊𝖕𝖞 1y ago

Tekkadan, ゲロゲロ! 🐸 1y ago

Maybe you can? I don't really use it. I'm still clinging to the relay but getting rate limited to shit. Do you use a mobile client?

david 1y ago

I use damus, and I can update my relay list on damus. Works as far as I can tell.

Not long ago I realized I had to quit and restart damus for the updated relays list to take effect. Not sure if that’s still necessary or not.

node 1y ago

Of course you can

ChipTuner 1y ago

I want to give some gentle pushback on RaaS. The largest overarching idea is to decentralize. Nostr isn't decentralized when the majority of relays become hosted on AWS behind cloudflare. Regardless of the cloud provider, reminder that cloud = someone else's servers.

> So here’s the question: How do we turn a service like relay.tools into something every nostr user MUST HAVE?

david 1y ago

This is a valid and important point. But we must constantly remind ourselves that users will not do things like run personal relays at home for ideological reasons. They’ll do it if it’s easy, cheap, and awesome as a consumer.

How about this as a bridge:

1. I set up something like relay.tools which is quick and easy

2. I set up a mirror relay at home on an umbrel or start9, as a backup to my relay in the cloud.

If my home relay goes out and I don’t notice for months or years (which has a high likelihood of happening), that’s ok bc the cloud relay is doing the actual work. If the cloud service rugs me or comes under the thumb of the state, that’s probably ok bc I probably have it all backed up at home, and maybe now I’ll be motivated to make sure my home relay stays connected.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 1y ago

i think "bridge" is a keyword here

run a service that provides the bouncers and reverse proxies, and build tooling that makes home serving easy

the hard part about home serving is inbound routing and DNS and domain name stuff

wireguard tunnels and reverse proxies make it easy, but it's not so simple that it's a home router situation, and aggregating that service would get a lot more people running servers

sure, the signals are not as decentralized as they could be but go talk to the IETF and IANA and Cisco and all the rest about the problem of slow progress on full IPv6 rollout

david 1y ago

Def needs to be easier to do home serving. But those tools won’t exist without a demand to support them. Perhaps nostr could add to that demand. Get users to run personal relays in the cloud, then get users to set up relay backups at home on start9 or umbrel, then watch users start asking for the tooling you mention.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 1y ago

i'm only not already doing it because i have prededent tooling to build on the stack i am planning

ChipTuner 1y ago

Correct. "Censorship resistance" is no longer a selling point when people are encouraged to load up their relay in the same cloud.

I think maybe we don't need to reach individuals and encourage them to setup cloud relays, because again my argument is cloud relays don't strengthen censorship resistance, so unless you need a private relay for private things, I don't think its right to encourage normies to cloud host a relay, it's a false predicate.

We need to encourage self-hosted hosted platforms like you mentioned to get relays into the hands of hosters. And get everyone's geeky friend to set them up a relay on their own metal.

I would rather rely on the hardcore nostr developers hosting public relays (paid or not) and having normies use them over private cloud relays.

I think people (specifically in the US) forget how much control the ABCs have over cloud providers and how much data they hoover, I think it's doing user's a disservice in the long run.

david 1y ago

My question is this: why would anyone go to the trouble of running a personal relay? Assuming that the altruistic motivation to decentralize nostr doesn’t count, bc it isn’t sustainable.

Here’s my best answer: build a personal relay that calculates your Grapevine WoT Lists and updates them in real time. I can see this becoming a MUST HAVE.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 1y ago

yes, WoT is a big factor, as is archiving your own stuff, a 512gb HDD can store you and your follows post as long as you follow under 1000 people

smarter relays that notice your changes in your lists and adjust a precaching worker cron also mean that every time you go away to do something else you come back and all the content is already there in your own house

censorship resistance is not a benefit for marketing

but instant, pre-emptive caching of data IS

as is an intelligent cache strategy that not only uses your queries to figure out what threads it should probably cache, it may also want to grab some of respondent's content in the thread preemptively in case you want to click through to their profile or their feed, if you react to it or reply to it, for example, and that manages your storage so that once someone lives in your block list for a long time it preferentially deletes their content to free space for stuff you care about

there's so many facets to how you can benefit from your own home data cache of events, and the best part is censorship resistance becomes a product of it rather than it being an aspirational objective

it's YOUR social network, not someone's fake ass publisher and engagement farming funnel

Alison Avery 1y ago

I certainly agree with you. "Geeky friends"/plebs like me will definitely set it up for ourselves at home if someone shows us the way. Then we "power users" educate and translate to the outside world.

You guys create, we embrace, then we translate and help people onboard. I've been in this position my whole life. And I Iove it.

ChipTuner 1y ago

I think the economic incentives will always vertically align with SaaS. I think about this daily. But do we actually have nostr if relays mostly exist in the cloud. Do we have censorship resistance if relays mostly exist in the cloud.

Keyword mostly. Do we want to encourage users to host cloud relays vs just paying for public relays? We can then defer trust to the more central relay hosters as they are more likely motivated than cloud hosters.

I think governments have the power to fire the cannon at cloud providers. On top of that becomes data privacy, relays generally aren't all that secure in terms of data storage. As secure as a cloud database and an HTTPS connection that can be intercepted by the cloud provider as a service as well.

cloud fodder 1y ago

I align with your thoughts here, although I am also a realist. I have built relay.tools to be 100% cloud agnostic. That means it can run on any linux machine, anywhere with the only dependencies being DNS and SSL certificate providers. Currently I run on a small server hosting platform that is not the BIG clouds. The thing is, you are always going to be dependent on a service provider, ISP, or various other internet infrastructure regardless of how you choose to operate. Even if you ran a server at home, and opened up it's ports to the internet, then your ISP can shut you down. Therefor the best you can do is remain agile. You probably shouldn't burn your home ISP as those are hard to come by, you should shuttle your traffic to a cheap VPS somewhere and let the traffic exit there, protect your home ISP geoIP location. Don't build things that lock you into a specific provider (I haven't), retain the ability to 'hop' around if a provider decides they don't want your business.

ChipTuner 1y ago

To be clear I'm not attacking you, your platform, or your products. I'm speaking out loud.

I believe I'm also a generally a realist that's refusing to ignore a problem with the idea of marketing a product to slightly-above average users wanting to host a relay. I'm refusing to ignore the "well that's just the way it is" it feels like enabling a systemic problem. I spent many years in customer support simply providing education about a complex topic myself and still believe those were resources well spent. I'm arguing you cannot truthfully make the promise of nostr freedom using cloud services. Therefor it should not be marketed as such if that's going to be the case.

I would consider myself quite versed in sysadmin world and am regularly hit with the complications of the lifestyle of maintaining a mini data center of enterprise equipment.

I refuse to accept the "reality is people are simply too dumb, busy or bothered" so I will sell them convenience and a one-size fits all approach in perpetuity. The problem is still user education, and we keep avoiding it.

I will accept that no economic incentives exist to educate users. In fact economic incentives exist to keep users ignorant in much of the world. Most TV commercials express the message "don't do X, we can do it for you"

I just think we need to be more cautious about how were marking products and still align with the promises that can be delivered, when nostr generally makes grandiose freedom and ownership promises.

ChipTuner 1y ago

>The problem is still user education, and we keep avoiding it.

That's because user education isn't a product that can be easily sold or marketed. People want to purchase bandaids, pills, and duct tape. People simply want to be sold good enough.

cloud fodder 1y ago

All good man, I'm not quite following..

ChipTuner 1y ago

Fair. Things always sound more clear in my head :) I think this deserves a blog or something more long form.

david 1y ago

It’s always a challenge to balance the “purist” approach with the practical realities. I imagine a Venn diagram, a small set of actions that allow us to be completely true to both.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 1y ago

if it doesn't pay the bills it isn't even considered, but with fiat a lot of that is just directing the flood of liquidity and not about actually meeting a market need

ChipTuner 1y ago

I would consider it more of an overton window.

ChipTuner 1y ago

I think there may be too much overlap with "practical realities" and cop out. Not in all cases, I guess it depends why were here.

david 1y ago

This is why I see it as a Venn diagram. Super easy to meet one requirement without the other:

cypherpunk but no PMF

PMF but not cypherpunk

The challenge is to achieve both at the same time.

ChipTuner 1y ago

I think I can agree

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 1y ago

i think the point is about finding legitimate market needs to fulfill

i've been saying this for some time

much of the money coming to bitcoin and nostr dev does not make conditions of contingency upon building an actual business model from it, just building some idealistic thing

if the focus was on making actual business, and not fiat VC burn, we'd be a lot more effective at getting people to come here and stay and turn off the mainstream

there just isn't much difference, shitty software, half assed ideas, and nobody actually trying to make a business that actually brings in enough money to pay the people making it happen

david 1y ago

💯

cloud fodder 1y ago

this would be a really fun project, having a relay on your local network that could act as a caching accelerator, and synchronize it with your remote relay.. i've been meaning to try compiling strfry for ARM, to see if it will build, but just haven't gotten to it yet.

cloud fodder 1y ago

I have a *lot of thoughts on this 💫 Here are a few:

Relay.tools software is kind of like CPanel from the 2000s. It's something that any server operator can install, and then re-sell their server as relays, to others that don't have the time or skills to get one setup. These customers of the "hub" are usually looking to get going quickly and easily. They save time and are able to spend that time vetting their nostr idea, developing, trying things out. When their project takes off, they can 'graduate' to being a server admin themselves, or they may be satisfied to continue to use the "hub". So the #1 value of the service is simply, saving valuable time.

There are 3 tiers in a relay.tools hub. There's the server admin(s). There's the relay owner+moderators. There's the users. Each tier has a chance to monetize or subsidize the existence of a relay. The users share a relay, enabling them to have a low-cost 'homebase' in which to interact with the larger nostr community, and the owner+moderators monetize their value by curating, promoting, and generally giving the relay a purpose. The server admin(s) monetize their value by providing a quality service and dealing with all the stuff that comes with running the servers themselves (paying for them, keeping them running smoothly). This tiered system gets us going at a cost level that should be affordable and worthwhile to all parties.

There are soooo many reasons to run a relay. It can make your head spin. There are private inbox relays to support better DMs and groups. There are community relays, there are relays that allow specific kinds that other relays won't allow. Being discoverable. Not getting throttled. Doing client testing. Hanging out with friends. Just to name a few.

Based on my calculations, running a relay hub can be in profit fairly quickly. As long as you don't overspend on servers. For myself though, I spend a lot of time developing the software so my business plan is a combination of a lot of factors, it is an opensource business plan and as nostr grows my value is in providing my services or knowledge to those that will need relay expertise, want a feature developed for relay.tools, support for their hubs, work with clients or etc.

david 1y ago

But suppose I’m just a lowly pleb, not a dev or a builder. How do you convince me to pay for a personal relay? Without appeal to abstract principles like censorship resistance? What will I be able to do with a personal relay that I can’t do without one?

Or perhaps you’re not necessarily targeting lowly plebs or devs, but somewhere in the middle: regular business owners who want to run a relay for their business and need to customize it and want to make it as painless as possible. Not sure I see the need for that but maybe I just need a little imagination. Pretend I am running a restaurant. Will I some day have a need for a customized business relay?

I ask bc I see web of trust as an answer to the question: I will want a personal relay to keep track of my grapevine WoT scores. But maybe there is more that I don’t yet appreciate.

cloud fodder 1y ago

The usecase for someone like this could be a few things. WoT is for sure applicable. Being able to store larger lists is a bonus. One real-world example I see is that we have all these DVMs, but those DVMs are unusable unless you add these special DVM relays right? The DVMs cannot interact on the public relays as they get too throttled and cannot perform their functions via limited relays. So someone might pay to subscribe to a DVM relay. They might pay to subscribe to a relay that's main focus is WoT, large lists, profiles, etc so that they don't get rugged posting a list. Things like this. I do not really see the one relay per person model as a focus, although there has been some demand for this (as backups). At some point I may offer a relay plan that is simply for backups/personal relay, but I have mostly been focusing on more community aspects of relays so far because I like the idea of organic growth and community. When you have a community relay, it contains data that is valuable to you as a client of the relay (your friends profiles, their lists, their comments, their ability to contact you).

ManiMe 1y ago

Yup. Personal relays to host private communities. That’s the big use case for private relays.

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