it seems when people say they want relay feeds, what they really are saying is that they want curated feeds and algos?
Discussion
Seems correct
relay feeds don't make sense. People join relays simply because they are free or because it's a popular relay. Why exactly do I want a relay feed? We already had relay feeds in the previous version of amethyst and it was useless.
What we need is country, state, city feeds
I think the argument from nostr:npub180cvv07tjdrrgpa0j7j7tmnyl2yr6yr7l8j4s3evf6u64th6gkwsyjh6w6 et al is that it opens up innovation by relay operators to create curated feeds with wide client support
as long as relay operators implement county feeds that would be amazing, frankly I can't see users becoming faithful to a relay,
messing around and adding relays have become less important since amethyst improved the relay settings in the newest amethyst
Yeah, it doesn't make sense for the damus relay or whatever, but I do use it for a relay that by design is for a certain type of user, it costs a tiny amount to join, doesn't curate, but it does have certain guidelines for notes. Its more like browsing the notes of a follow list and its great because I want to occasionally see posts from those people, but not follow them all, or have them clutter my main feed.
I don't know if its wise for these relays to use the same interface as a take everything relay, but I don't see the downside, but also, there is no way to really draw a line between the 2.
lol, viewing this from a new client which whole point is that relay feeds are basically mandatory
users not having to do anything would be interesting
yeah, they just segment themselves by who invites them so it's all transparent for them, not something they have to think about, but it models their experience wrt p2p trades (nip-69 built in), marketplace listing (nip-99), and anything else that makes sense to be local-first.
That's my read, why not filter at client? Is it because you don't want a ton of stuff on your relay?
I’m just trying to understand jumble’s relay feeds as a feature. Thinking of what it affords and if thats the right level of abstraction to expose to the user.
You could make the argument users are used to typing in websites in the browser to go to different content, so it could be similar to that.
subreddits are the obvious analogy
Really? That’s not how I interpret it.
Relay feed to me, I select a relay, and only see notes from that relay.
Like how Jumble started. It was amazing, the. Something happened and it became confusing.
right, but what is the point of viewing a relay as a feed? It would only make sense if it’s a curated feed of people. An algo.
Ah. I get your point.
That could be a good way to interpret it.
To me it’s to filter out the noise.
For example, if I only want to see posts from bitcoindistric.org folks whitelisted on the relay. I tap my nip address in Damus and see my friends notes.
Same with nostrarabia.com, one click and I’m with my group isolating all the noise.
I do the same thing in Damus universe relay filter. But the UX is not really designed for the purpose.
I guess you can call that algo. It’s a filter for me.
Not necessarily. A festival is a good example: the venue operates a relay & only accepts notes posted by people who have write access via invite code on their ticket or something. People are posting & sharing what's going on at the venue with eachother & only viewing eachother's notes, but they can still switch to their home feed to see if the babysitter is actually playing on their phone instead of cooking dinner.
Meanwhile, anyone following the attendees is also seeing what is being posted... cuz outbox. They think it looks fun, want to attend the next festival, whatever... they can reply & stuff... cuz outbox.
The venue doesn't have to worry about partnering with a client or having their own app and all that. They can wipe it & reset for the next night. Attendees don't have to worry about installing another app. They can just sign in & use whatever relay feed supporting app they use & go.
Any place or thing could have its own live social media feed instead of or in cunjunction with a typical website. It's kind of curated but not really. Things just aren't that far along yet. Curation, algos, and interesting ways of interacting are a good start. Sorting & discovering needs work but there needs to be enough relay diversity to do it.
a curated set of notes, like wss://relays.land/spatianostra;
an algorithm that fetches data from other relays and sorts them somehow, like wss://algo.utxo.one;
a relay where people intentionally publish exclusive notes to, like wss://imp.relays.land or wss://topic.relays.land/praise;
a semi-closed community, like wss://pyramid.fiatjaf.com;
a personal utility service, like wss://bookmarks.relays.land or wss://personal.relays.land;
a set of people self-selected according to some filtering criteria, like wss://nostr.wine or wss://nostr.land;
a semi-open public relay with intentional directed posts but strict moderation, like wss://relays.land/bitcoindev;
Don’t bother, been asking Will for topical relay explorer for over a year, he doesn’t it.
there’s a round about way of doing it in global by turning off all relays except for the one you want to see, but very bad UX
I very much get it, thanks. which is why our meetings this morning was about the best way to add it that isn't confusing.
I think you are misunderstanding what I'm saying. I am not saying its a bad idea, i'm trying to reverse engineer what users actually want vs what relay explorer/selection is affording as a feature.
I didn't think you were saying it was a bad idea, you were one of the first people to talk concretely about custom relay feeds if I remember correctly.
I was just using the opportunity to make a list.
There are probably a ton of other use cases, like internal relays, temporary relays for conferences and closed events, more utility use cases like I don't know you publish something there and the relay prints your message and mails it to you (silly example, this doesn't even make sense as a feed).
I'm trying to have more crazy ideas, but I bet other people will have them better once the possibility is unlocked in their minds. But also only in the scope of the relay classes listed above we already have enough room to fulfill many more interesting use cases.
Just communities and curation are already enough to justify having relay-feed-capable clients. The curation case is infinitely useful. Almost every one of the "whatever-on-Nostr" use cases (music on Nostr, business listings on Nostr, geocaching on Nostr, uber on Nostr, wikipedia on Nostr, livestreaming on Nostr etc) would benefit drastically from having curated relays, and it could become a profitable thing eventually, as I probably wrote on nostr:naddr1qqyrze35vscrzvfcqyghwumn8ghj7enfv96x5ctx9e3k7mgzyqalp33lewf5vdq847t6te0wvnags0gs0mu72kz8938tn24wlfze6qcyqqq823c0z85e2 (but I didn't reread). There is also the case for "publications"/magazines which I've seen many people talking about and to me that is a textbook example of a curated relay.
Many of the DVM use cases could also be reframed as relays with special functionality and they would work much better and be simpler.
it seems to me that many talking heads ask for things without knowing what they are asking for, what the possible impkications are, or why they want it in the first place.
oh wait, that's the last 40-50 years of politics and policy in the West.
🤣
Essentially. Where do you do this? Locally on the client or on the relay? Something somewhere has to do the heavy lifting.
Or a DVM 🚬
I'm becoming less of a DVM Maxi as time moves forward as DVMs go offline. It's a bad user experience to see a DVM feed and tap on it and nothing happens or it's slow to return results. It's cool, technology wise, but user experience wise, I now see lots of room for failure.
predicted this, which is why I never implemented it.
can you share lists of pubkeys on amethyst? do people do this?
They are announced. I personally use them a lot.
Yes and yes. (If you mean follow packs?)
lists in general
Yes, people post them and they're shown in the feed and also notifications.
Next version will have new screen to manage lists by nostr:nprofile1qqswc4nrhvp4lrjct0ayy0ps8f2hvj8e2guucp63dwcx6m6e8pka9fqppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyv9kh2uewd9hj7qgawaehxw309ahx7um5wghxy6t5vdhkjmn9wgh8xmmrd9skctcjuq3jp. Lots of cool new things we can do when we give people the right tools.
Wrong assumptiona here. Primal is hosting a bunch of dvms too.
I'd say a hybrid of both.
For advanced users, they can curate their own feeds, for noobs they want content curated for them.
Some of us just take our feeds raw, as is pure 1:1 as the npubs post it.
Maybe a WoT system helps too, reduces the bots, and spam.
For me, it's not so much about having content catered to me but allowing me to find the human content more easily, and ignoring unuseful bots.
Who knows 🤷♂️, that's just what I think though.
I think it goes back to the original nostr days before outbox, ditto et all where the idea of nostr was to connect to a single relay at a time. That the relay was a specific community. I would have a relay for friends, a relay for family, that joe rogan would have a joe rogan relay. That notes wouldn't move accross the network but would be morw siloed into a group. I always liked that idea.
That's the Fediverse model, which we know isn't the best because content can be censored or disappeared. I like specific relays for specific content or people, for community specific relays, but I want that content to propagate too.
Yeah, topical relays that are moderated by the relay owner and moderators. nostr:npub10npj3gydmv40m70ehemmal6vsdyfl7tewgvz043g54p0x23y0s8qzztl5h sorta had this going on with relay.tools
The algo is basically hashtags, event kinds, the relay owner and moderators curation.
Really only works with paid realys or spam and off topic posts overtake the relay feed.
It's because follow lists don't scale and are notoriously broken. Any client I use, can't handle my follow list of only ~800 pubkeys. I miss all kinds of content that supposedly I am following. Lists could have possibly helped here, but also, if a client can't handle a 800 pubkey list, then wat, have a bunch of 200 pubkey lists? It didn't end up mattering because no clients built in list support and using the follow button even once breaks your follow list half the time.
Relays can handle this processing, create mega lists of pubkeys, pull in extra stuff, provide better content and discovery of people you weren't following in case you did want to "bookmark" them for the day when clients can handle it, or use your lists to create new relay filters and streams. The relay becomes a hub of content, for a community, it can run bots and people can see those bots and won't get throttled.
Many reasons, but these are just a few to get started.
hmm I should get back to #nostrscript dev... opening up a dev community (not just relay runners) to custom algos will be huge.
This. Not having multiple list support built into clients natively is Nostr's greatest failure. One follow list is useless, like email with only an inbox and no folders. That's why people are looking for alternatives, to an interface that doesn't scale.
You mean to say, you haven’t sought user feedback on what they actually want and we’re just interpreting everything through your dev lens?!
I’m shocked Will!!! Completely schocked!!!!
I don't think its as simplistic as that. I see it as the opposite.
It can be summed up with the famous henry ford quote: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses".
its a thought experiment to determine what is the best version of what the user wants based on what they think they want.
80% of dev work is reverse engineering what the client actually wants vs what they tell you they want. most product/dev people know this. its not new.
You sir, are not Henry Ford.
I funded a 0.1 BTC bounty to get lightning polls on Nostr before March 2023 - nostr:note1z45d87h5s275g7svp5mu08jp9mdsnftd7xvslpmrv8nswtyzadvqw4nyyw
It’s October 2025 and Damus still doesn’t have this feature.
One of the most popular features on Xitter, the perfect usecase to increase zap flows on Nostr, and instead you went off and designed a fucking dining table for horses, rather than service your Users.
So don’t give me your thought experiment bullshit Will.
People want polls. You’ve not delivered in 2.5 years, and instead sidelined your iOS app which was popular enough for the CCP to ban it so you could focus on “other things”.
noone is obliged to implement a feature you want. pay someone to implement it if you want it implemented. we obviously don't think its the most important thing for nostr to succeed, or else we would have prioritized it.
the top of our list right now is better content discovery, onboaring, communities, etc
the number one feedback we get is people who join and leave because its hard to find non-bitcoin content. they aren't leaving because they don't have fucking zap polls. how entitled do you have to be to talk to people like this on the internet?
No, of course they’re not!
That’s why I put up a 0.1 BTC bounty. Of which you or your team could have had a share if the Damus project wasn’t led by a fucking moron.
Getting zaps flowing and seeing how a lightning firewall works in social media was obviously important though, given you were at the forefront of that followed by Cameri with the relays.
You were just too shortsighted to see how other zap usecases could help accelerate adoption and have ignored the usecase for 2.5 years since; because you’re Henry Fucking Ford, and we should all adopt whatever slop you now pump out!
I pay tens of million of sats of my own money every months out to people working on damus to get actual work done, i'm putting my money where my mouth is. this work is not easy and people are busting their ass off trying their best. you are an entitled prick and are now muted, bye.
Nah bruh, you can manage your lightning node in notedeck though. That will have the normies piling in 😂
Well if you can manage your lightning node through your desktop Nostr client then that’s definitely better than the social use case of lightning polls!
After all, how else are you going to manage your lightning node?! What, through the other myriad of lightning node apps???! Like a fucking retard???!
Of course not!
Now if you wanted to see more zaps flowing on Nostr what would be a good way to do that? Lightning polls maybe?.. Which could lead to prediction markets.. Which could have seen Polymarket built on Nostr but for the Devs who think your social client needs to run your fucking node..
Literally don’t know one person who wants polls. That’s stupid. Also, you might want to get off your high horse and be a little less entitled.
Polls are already a thing just use a client that supports them
🤷🏻♂️
Poll with 2 votes lol
my main concern is a single script that could be written to ruin every poll that pops up. it would be very easy. we don't have the web of trust quality i would like to be at to filter those out. and even then it would only be results from your friends, which has limited usefulness. best part of X polls is that they are open to everyone, but that mainly works because its centralized and can do that.
also polls on X are anonymous which makes people more willing to engage with them. Something you can’t really do on nostr. Some things just work better on a centralized network. Its easy to *blame the devs* when you don’t have to do the actual work to make it work
It’s easy to feign ignorance when the bounty specified open polls to avoid the brigading of polls seen on Xitter when you think of yourself as the Henry Ford of a particular industry.
If Polls were rolled out when I put up the bounty, they’d be getting more than 2 votes today.
But Henry Ford here knew we didn’t need polls, we just needed a desktop version of his iOS app.
I was the first person to donate to him and have never touched his desktop client because I don’t need another fucking desktop client, contrary to what Henry Ford says.
Your conception was fundamentally flawed from the start. Polls only work when there isn't a buy in. I use Amethyst (which has your polls) and I have talked with lots of other Amethyst users. None of us like or use polls, and the reason is because they charge Sats.
The reason is because they never got support from other clients, mainly due to the other major client at the time, Damus, not implementing them.
It wouldn't matter now, because Damus is a minor client, one of many on iOS, and no longer the best option anyways. Yakihonne is better in every way, and has poll support.
Dude we have support. A bunch of us use Amethyst. None of us use polls. Using these retarded pay-to-win polls would be insulting to everyone reading my post.
The problem isn't the percentage of people who have access to polls. The problem is that polls turn what should be a genuine human interaction into a transaction.
Maybe instead of asking how many people have access to zap polls as a feature, you should be asking how many people have chosen not to connect a wallet to their account despite the fact that lightning support is practically ubiquitous?
You can make it a simple 1 sat to vote poll, it doesn't have to be pay to win. There are limits built into the nip and the implementation. A small payment is a perfect way to disincentivize spammers too. Free polls will be useless due to them
And you're plainly wrong. Being available in only one client is a huge issue that makes features non viable, use your head. If it's only working for a small number of users, it won't gain traction. We see this constantly on Nostr.
Just because you don't know how something works doesn't make it a bad idea 🤷♂️
Dude, you don't get it. 0 sats would be too many. A poll should not require people to get out their wallets. Period. It doesn't matter what they take out or don't take out of their wallets.
Tbh Nostr's spam issue is way overblown. The people who care most about it only care because they are looking for excuses to shove Bitcoin into everything. No offense if that describes you.
Again, it doesn't matter if it was available to everybody. I'm telling you it STILL wouldn't gain traction. And I have given specific reasons for this conclusion.
Just don’t use #Damus because Polls
are not supported there 2.5 years after a bounty to get them implemented was released because Will “Henry Ford” Casarin decided nobody wanted them even though he was building a Xitter clone and just left out this important Xitter feature
I prefer Damus as my default client
Sorry bro, no polls for you. Will didnt want to develop that feature, he wanted to make another client for desktop and compete with all the other desktop clients they serve that space just fine.
some people think that making an app is simply adding every feature that everyone asks for. if people want that they could just use amethyst. damus ios is trying to do one thing and one thing well. I don't even think its that good at what it does yet. still trying to make it more performant.
next testflight is really slick, adds local relay and offline support via the embedded relay! should help with low connectivity environments.
Got polls in there Henry Ford?
No?
I just want a faster horse?!
How does go fuck yourself sound?
I get your point. But this is nostr. On nostr, Damus is just one app.
Does nostr give you polls? Yes. use the app that provides it.
Expecting every app to have every feature is a recipe for failure.
You missed the part where I put up a 0.1 BTC bounty to get this implemented on Nostr.
Forgive me for not falling to my knees and sucking Henry Cassarin’s cock
No I saw that. And that’s very generous of you.
But like if I put a bounty of 1 bitcoin for Amethyst to remove streaming that doesn’t mean my idea is now worth 1 bitcoin.
Except I didn’t put a bounty up to remove stuff?
I put a bounty up when there were a few thousand ppl here everyday to build something, and that something still doesnt exist in Henry Ford’s corner of #Nostr, 2.5 years later.
So you’re mad because you randomly sent money to someone and they didn’t magically do everything you asked for? got it.
Go hire your own dev. Fork the code and build your own. 🤷♂️
I think people lost the skill and drive for digging for content, bei g now used to be delivered anything without effort.
Finding people to follow and getting content on nostr coming from twitter was / is not as straight forward anymore. Liking stuff is now just liking stuff again and not steering your feed. People don't boost too much variety so breaking out of you small starting following bubble is harder etc.
I think what people point towards is that "stumbling" upon new stuff is way harder and some just want to relax and see the posts drive by without it being only the same 7 cars.
my two zaps
(coining it)
This is very true. Most of my friends who joined #nostr didn’t stay because they couldn’t find content that would make them stay.
My way of curing the content in my feed is by hand we review relays and followed.
99.99% don’t do this. Clients help is needed here.
YES! Algorithms curation and dictators of the feed are good for services! Nostr is an insane thought experiment that people actually went and made. I think we need to take it back to reality a little bit more. Nostr should allow censorship on its simplest setting. Follows and the global feed should only need to exist as a safety net, not the default!
I think what people really want has always been a way to discover content and people they’re interested in. Curated relays, algorithmic relays, invite-chain relays, language-based relays, or follow packs — are all just different ways of aggregating related content and surfacing it to users.