Absolutely. This is why we need to advocate for more people to run their own relay. Which means it needs to be even easier to do and we also need easy backup, recovery, and migration tools so people and migrate to new hardware easily. I can do this. Can a random person on the street? Probably not.
Nostr seems good for uncensorable, recent information.
But suppose the year is now 2033.
How many relays will still store this note? And who will be making queries for it?
If you're gonna use nostr for something that needs long term storage like maybe highlighter.com by nostr:npub1l2vyh47mk2p0qlsku7hg0vn29faehy9hy34ygaclpn66ukqp3afqutajft (fucking amazing), you'll want a private relay or some kind of relay as a service.
It's still on you to take responsibility for your data if you want to truly own it!
Discussion
When I eventually get back to playing with nostr I still want to build a personal relay whose only purpose is to aggregate you and your followers content and rebroadcast it to as many relays as possible. With this set up, a user both has a data back-up and an aggregator relay that they can access from mobile via something like Tailscale. Will see what hurdles I run into when trying to implement but it doesn’t seem like the performance should be too bad.
This is essentially the Umbrel model.
Does umbrel support rebroadcasting of events now? Doesn’t a user have to connect to both their umbrel relay AND any other relay they want to publish to?
To me the key distinction is offloading the long relay list from most user devices and onto their personal server. It could be an extremely powerful change (would love to see umbrel implement this)
This also mitigates issues caused by certain clients failing to broadcast notes across a wide enough set of relays. All of these rebroadcasting parameters could be tweaked on the personal server, which effectively needs to act as a relay/client hybrid
I had a very rich implementation of this back in January and was pretty useful since I could implement a bunch of cool shit that clients didn’t need to know about
Not very rich, the opposite: very rough
The part I find most interesting about rebroadcasting is you don’t even need to put your nsec on the personal server! If all it’s doing is retransmitting the event you can set up all sorts of stuff without needing permission from the authoring npub.
Even little stuff like automatically rebroadcasting an event that you reply to to your network. Something that all clients should do IMO, but you could make it happen by default regardless of the client you use.
Umbrel gives you a one-click relay on your own box!
They do, but it's not all that easy for the average person when you add Tailscale to the mix, which is needed to get it to work.
