I actually forget that amethyst as a 'conversations' tab as home feed option. Which is actually much better to look at for possible interesting threads and peoplr than 'trending'.
(I am relay-clueless so global feed is mostly unusable to me lol)
But a lot of this goes back to a lack of topic-based mechanisms/clients. You have to follow people here, when you could be better off, depending on what you want from Nostr, perhaps subscribing to topic feeds instead.
Yeah, but topic feeds that become popular quickly fill up with spam and porn (but, I repeat myself).
That's why forums, groups, and communities are better, as they have moderators. Gatekeeping keeps the signal strong.
I think the optimal future will have topical relays and clients that post to different relays depending on your context.
If I'm discussing sourdough in the sourdough group, then reads/writes related to that group all go to a dedicated sourdough relay, and none others.
More general-purpose/global relays can use negentropy to pull sourdough posts from that topical relay, and perhaps label those posts to the client so the user can follow them back to the community from which they originated.
Well, the relay-hint might help. Or an auto-tag or label.
What's a relay hint?
Is that the h-tag (used in NIP-29 for example)?
NIP-29 doesn't reference relays in any tags, but you can see the "recomended relays" part of tags and fields in NIP-01.
I meant the h-tag that mentions the community on the relay your publication is targeted at.
I need a tag like that mentions the targeted relay, because I think communities should be straight up relays anyway: nostr:naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzp22rfmsktmgpk2rtan7zwu00zuzax5maq5dnsu5g3xxvqr2u3pd7qyt8wumn8ghj7mnfv4kzumn0wd68yvfwvdhk6tcpz9mhxue69uhkummnw3ezumrpdejz7qq0wd5k6urvv4ch2etnw35k7mnnuywg0l
Yeah communities are a ghost town, but they do have a handy tag at the top of the post to tell you where the note has come from, similar to followed hashtags (on amethyst at least).
I just feel so out of my depth with relays lol. Say you are following 20 topics, you would have 20 relays? How would I post to just one relay? Maybe it would be similar to posting on a community on Nostrudel, where you select from a drop-down menu? But yeah the difference being it wouldnt also post on your main feed? I have no idea lol
Yup, the "Share your post" part is an important part of the UX.
In what I'm buidling out it's literally a step you **cannot** skip.
(like in 💯 normie -friendly Instagram)
By letting the Community take care of being the Relay, Blossom media server, etc... it's okay to be out of your depth with all those technicalities. It's all about targetting content to the appropriate audience.
Yes, you could just select which relay you want to post to, from a drop-down menu in the note-writing form. Amethyst and Habla.News already have this. You can select your relays during the publication process.
Hzrd already said that he wants to move to relay-selection, but that it'll take awhile, as he'd have to rewrite so much code.
The problem I face is that my communities list keeps being nuked by some client, someplace, so every time I want to select a community, when writing, the drop-down list is blank. 😅🙈
Gave up, but this could be fixed.
They often disappear for me on amethyst, but clearing cache brings them back. But mostly given up posting to them anyway lol
The old communities events include relay hints. NIP-29 groups are completely detached from relays.
Yeah i can't really comment on relays or whatever or any of this lolol, I still don't know why a relay is preferable to a bliesky-type feed. I think nostr:nprofile1qqs8d3c64cayj8canmky0jap0c3fekjpzwsthdhx4cthd4my8c5u47spz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0wd68ytnsw43qz9rhwden5te0wfjkccte9ejxzmt4wvhxjmcpzemhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumn0wvh8xmmrd9skchd02dz was also wondering about a proper relay directory with topics/interests.
Bluesky feeds are a filter on the content. They look for particular keywords or exclude keywords, and if your note fits to that set, and you're allowed on the feed as a user, they add your post to the feed. This is the same way a topic relay can work, like https://christpill.nostr1.com
>>Feeds offer some of the same functionalities as hashtags, lists, or communities. A feed is simply a curated list of posts on Bluesky. The curation can be done fully openly, as with a feed that searches for any keywords and automatically indexes them. (This can approximate hashtag behavior and some feeds are keyed to hashtag-looking keywords, like #LandBack.) Feeds can also display all posts from some users or some posts from a pre-screened list of users.<<
The main difference is that Bluesky probably only has one "bread baking" feed because they only have one big note-faucet that the feed filters notes from. So, if you get banned from that feed or from the faucet, then you can't just spin up a different relay with a new feed. You just have to talk about bread by yourself, from then on.
Hmm I'm not sure about the technical side of Bluesky feeds either, but they seem to be user-made (?). In my play about on Bluesky I have seen several film feeds (one uses all notes that add a 📽️ emoji to select from, and the moderate for eg).
But yeah I'm not sure about anything :)
Bluesky feeds are curated. That's why they seem to work better and have higher signal. The data gets pushed through a filter, basically.
DVMs do something similar, but instead of doing it continually, for everyone receiving the feed, you send off a request and they run the filter for you, especially. That's why it's called a "Data Vending Machine". That's more personal, but also more resource-intensive. Makes more sense to do use that tool for more complex and uncommon combinations, than "show me the feed about baking" or "show me the top ten notes on the biggest 10 relays".
For some mysterious reason, there has been a real antipathy to linking context to relays. Topical relays are a superpower because you could just look through a list of relays and then select all of the ones for the topics you are interested in, and the relay moderators keep the posts on-topic and the spammers and trolls out.
Nothing stops there from being different relays addressing the same topic; you could write to any or all of them. You could have 3 different sourdough relays, 4 bible relays, a popery relay, 8 dev relays, a library relay, and a chat relays, and either combine them in your cloud relay, to save bandwidth, or stream some or all to your various clients and turn them on-and-off, individually, just by clicking checkboxes over your feed.
DVMs are a nice idea but so clunky. Afaik you can just auto subscribe and have them appear in your feed under a highlited label or something. Bluesky feeds are actually great to use, and appear as tabs on the homepage. That is actually something I do like about bluesky lol, and tbh they do have a wider breadth of topics with more interactions. Probably because they have a much much larger userbase. (Although they also suffer a not dissimilar problem of an ideological echo chamber, it isn't so topic-focused/fixated like nostr).
I feel like there isn't much of an attempt or urgency on nostr about this lol. Maybe it's because there's an idea of Nostr being inevitable. And maybe a bit of it is (my suspicion lol) that the only thing a lot of people seem to know here is bitcointwitter, so perhaps a lot of people are actually quite satisfied (content even ;) lol). They come in use it as a bitcoin chatroom, say the bitcoin slogans, look at some dry memes someone has posted from the explore page of Instagram and that's perfect.
You can ignore the people saying 'where is the content?' as being scared of freedom tech or wanting an algo (even tho no algo would ever give them what isn't even here in the first place - Other Topics). Pat themselves on the back for being freedom warriors and algo-free.
I like to think there are some devs out there who are working on Not-Bitcointwitter tho lol;)
Well, we are. So, that's a couple of devs. 😅
Yes sorry. I do recognise there are a significant, interesting minority of devs working along these lines. I'm just being dramatic lolol.
DVMs are largely a solution to a problem that we created by not having topical relays. 😅
Accurate 😂😂😂
The topical relay model is a different workflow:
1. You decided to write about a topic.
2. You client determines that the topic is "sourdough bread baking".
3. Your client writes the event to the "bread baking" relay and adds "sourdough" as a tag.
4. Everyone in the sourdough community forum immediately sees your event. Nobody else sees your event. The moderator (human or AI) can immediately moderate the event, as they know what a sourdough forum event should look like and they oversee the content on that relay.
5. You open your "notifications/chat/kind01" client and can see the responses from the sourdough forum in it.
6. You can respond there, only to them, but you can also allow your wider fren group to see the discussion, by broadcasting it to more relays.
The thing with relays, is that you could also write that "sourdough bread baking" event from Nostrudel or Primal, so long as you had the relay listed and could somehow indicate that it was the one you wanted to write to.
How is a relay determining it? I think I'll just leave this to the devs lol cos I won't understand the answer maybe lolol.
But let's say I make a post about a particular plugin or vst for music production. But I haven't mentioned the words 'music production' or whatever other words, but I want it on that relay. How would a client determine this, it couldn't possibly have all the possible words and brand names associated with a topic. And what about let's say I was also mentioning it was for the audio of a film. Would it then determine to post instead to a film relay? Or post to both?
I have no idea. Lol, I assume there are ways:) lol
Well, we could have relay selection boxes, when you post, so that you could determine it, manually. If you were responding to a music production thread, that would also be a hint, so we could just write the response back on the relay that it came from. It should be possible to post to n number of topical relays, so that the post ends up everywhere, that it might be useful, same way we do with general posts.
The basic difference is that the person publishing the post curates where it will go and how it will be defined/labeled/tagged. They then send it off to the appropriate relay. Then, everyone reading from that relay (because they are interested in the same topic or are part of the same community) can see it and respond to it.
The people who want to read it have it _sent to them_ over the relay. Or they go to a client where there's nothing but Stuff Like That.
They don't have to go dig it out of the gigantic heap of Bitcoin memes and EXTRA LARGE TEXT RESPONDING TO EXTRA LARGE TEXT.
Relay selection can be handled client side. This requires smart clients and smart relays working together, I think. Relay auth can be used to help protect relays from non-topical posts.
Also DVMs seem like an overly-complex way to reinvent REST APIs lol.
ROFLMAO
Like, why are we doing this complex Nostr interaction to get feed data? Just use an API, bro.
We have over 100k “feedback” events from DVMs on our aggregator that just say something along the lines of “I’m processing your task”
Absurd waste.
I'm not really sure, why it has to have an event. Seems more like a service a client would just offer, outright, as a feature. Not everything needs to generate an event or be a NIP.
The idea is to standardize everything so that nobody has to implement a bunch of proprietary APIs. I certainly get the appeal of that but the design is wasteful and slow.
Lots of the services “offered” by DVMs are just wrapping centralized services with more latency. For example, most search DVMs just use NIP-50 on one or more of the 3 search relay implementations. Using this instead of connecting directly to the relay(s) is so much more work.
With NIP-50:
1. Connect to search relay
2. Open search filter
3. Relay finds matching events and returns them
3. Display returned events
With DVMs:
1. Make a DVM request event
2. DVM makes NIP-50/search API request
3: DVM parses just the event IDs and returns a list of those in a nostr event
4. Client pulls response event and requests event IDs from all relays? Some relays? Only the NIP-50 relay(s) that supplied the DVM with the results?
5. Relay(s) finds matching events and return them
6. Client displays events
🤯
What happened to my numbering…
After 3 comes 4 - you get the idea 😂
Just saw that nostr:npub1fq8vrf63vsrqjrwqgtwlvauqauc0yme6se8g8dqhcpf6tfs3equqntmzut has got an elasticsearch version on github. 👀
https://github.com/layer-systems/search
nostr:npub1ecdlntvjzexlyfale2egzvvncc8tgqsaxkl5hw7xlgjv2cxs705s9qs735 nostr:npub1wqfzz2p880wq0tumuae9lfwyhs8uz35xd0kr34zrvrwyh3kvrzuskcqsyn nostr:npub1qdjn8j4gwgmkj3k5un775nq6q3q7mguv5tvajstmkdsqdja2havq03fqm7
I'm going to need to study up more on ElasticSearch
Well I start to like elasticsearch. But I'm still a noob at it :D
Interesting. That is one heck of a stack
Haha I hacked this together. Don't know if it event works right now 😂
Can you check, and fix it, if it doesn't?
#askingforafriend
It works! (More or less) Maybe some stuff is not build perfectly fine but it works :)
DVM's go waaaay beyond Topical feeds tho.
Probably one of their worst use cases tbh.
Yes, it's too broad. I could see it adding real value as a sort of "personal search worker" for finding something more unusual than "dev stuff" or "Catholic stuff" or "stuff about biking".
They're more like "categorized computation workers" that you pay cash for.
Any computation, not just filtering kind 1's, that's just one of the categories of things they do.
Wait... What? How? Where?
Amethyst Home at the top there are two tabs. One is New Threads the other is Conversations
Nevermind. Duh.
But also, I hate that view. I want complete threads, not just isolated replies. That is not a "conversation."
Yeah new threads is preferable to me too. However I have often clicked on Conversations usually by accident and found interesting posts people are replying to
But yeah not my main go-to
The problem is that you can't tell where "conversations" are, merely by looking at the OPs. That means everyone only opens the threads of the very biggest npubs, since they _know_ that there are always convos there.
The conversations thread is a work-around, to see where humans are hanging out, since we don't yet have any sort of heatmap.
I mostly would like a thread view with highlights of new additions to the thread by those npubs or tags I do follow or if I'm tagged.
well, that's how Coracle sort of does it
If I only have space to display one other truncated line above the reply you see, what would be most useful?
A. The previous reply
B. The original post
B. That would allow me to jump to the start of the thread.
Mmmm, that made me think of a solution that checks both boxes. Need to prototype asap.
previous reply for me.
else it becomes like youtube comments.
op: "cats are so cute"
...
last reply: "the struggle against the machines and the search for meaning in a chaotic world reflect our own battles against oppressive systems blah blah blah"
Hahaha yup 😅
Previous reply.
