I have stopped using the nostr.wine filter (and aggregator) relay for the first time in months and my experience has gotten noticeably worse.
How are folks that aren’t paying for that fantastic service optimizing their relay usage these days?
Discussion
I'm not paying, so I don't know what I miss out on not using nostr.wine.
That’s one way to do it. 😂 It’s definitely a lot harder to go back. Lots more missing events now
Could you elaborate more to someone new to Nostr about what kind of events are lacking if not subscribed?
Generally, any kind of event (note, reply, longform note, whatever) is only found on the relay that the original user published it to. If my short list of relays doesn’t overlap with those relays I will not see the event.
I think this is more of an issue in the short term for me since I was still signed up for the nostr.wine services a few days ago. Their service effectively broadcasts and retrieves events from a broader set of relays than I was subscribed to. Now that I am no longer using the service I am noticing that some of the events I was seeing and even some replies to my own events aren’t necessarily on my smaller set of relays.
I think part of the solution to this is clients getting smarter about where they broadcast and rebroadcast notes to especially when replying to a user that might not have much relay overlap with you.
Thanks for your response. I'm mainly using @plebstr (I hope this kind of tagging works). Do I know which relay I'm posting to? I didn’t know that I was posting to a primary relay.
I have heard of #[3] but not used it! On nostr the experience is quite variable both in terms of features and customizability. Some clients like Damus allow you to customize your relay list but all your content goes to all relays. Others like Nos may let you publish content to a specific relay for each note, and others that want to be more user friendly may take the relay management piece completely out of the users hands. The nice thing is that as long as you have your private key you can test different clients though people have run into some issues like losing their contact list if you try to jump between some clients too quickly. There are tools to fix those issues so I wouldn’t let that dissuade you from exploring!
I didn't do it right. I had to tag #[4] by copy-pasting the public key from the account page.
I follow a lot of people, and so rarely go to global
So you generally just try to make sure you have good relay overlap with your follows?
If I saw them and followed them, I should already have relay overlap.
But yea you might consider adding more relays, looks like I have 2x more than you
I think that’s the problem. I had optimized my list for mobile performance (data/battery) and was leaning pretty hard on nostr.wine. Really is a great service, but I will probably just adapt for now.
Sorry to hear we lost you Ryan! I’m happy to subsidize you for another month, we really appreciate your early contributions/feedback to filter.
Thank you so much, #[3]! You have not lost me. I am just not in a place where I plan to be using nostr very frequently, but as you can probably tell from my previous posts, I think filter is one of the highest value services available in the nostr ecosystem. Being able to roll with a small list of relays and still have great coverage is hugely important for mobile apps.
Are you exploring any options for payment via request/event size? I supposed that is probably a far more complex model to implement.
Appreciate the kind words! We’ve thought about it, but it does add a lot of complexity and unpredictability. Going to focus on adding more features for now!