Cleaned up my relay list to remove some that have been unresponsive or unreliable. Damus feels a lot smoother now. If you have been stacking relays for a while, it is definitely worth the time going through them and cleaning up the ones that aren’t working well.
Discussion
How many relays ser?
I cut my list down from 27 to 19. That is probably still more than is really needed.
Yep, good reminder. I don’t use many but I need to review. Also I probably need to pay my wine relay subscription pretty soon
I had built up a reasonably large list over time, cut down from 27 to 19 although I could probably still remove a few more. I will also need to look at the wine relay subscription.
What is the easiest way to tell they are not working will
The Damus relay settings show if they are connected although I tested several of them that I wasn’t sure about with a Python script to see if I could connect and pull down my profile information. If they wouldn’t connect with that then I assumed they are dead and removed them.
Above my pay grade at this point but I’m working on it
Yes! I’ve been trying to set the bar at 20 for frens just to keep it simple.
Yeah I’ve always found that 15-20 seems to work well for me although I know other people seem to be happy with less than that.
There are a lot of the ones you have. How do you know they are the best?
I don’t know that there necessarily is a best set of relays. I think you just want to have a range of relays that are working and provide enough overlap with relays people you want to interact with are using. Most of mine are just the ones I added early on and have been using for a while including a couple that I run myself.
That’s great. I select and debug mine by guiding me with https://stats.nostr.band/ and other recommendations. I want to set up my own relay. Any suggestions with which you can guide me?
I used these guides initially for setting up relay.nostr.com.au which is a paid relay here in Australia:
https://andreneves.xyz/p/set-up-a-nostr-relay-server-in-under
Perfect, thank you for the guide. I will check it to see if I can apply it in latam.
Does anyone know whether brb.io is out of commission? It hasn't been working for a long time now
I’ve been wondering about brb.io too. I’ve removed it from my relays for the moment.
I feel like there was an initial burst of support and the relays either outgrew their resources and/or operators have lost motivation without financial incentive. That being said, I plan to keep my free relays operational and performant, indefinitely. You're welcome to include them to your use 🤙
Yeah I think this is a problem. I believe brb.io was running on decent hardware so not sure about that one in particular but I think a lot of the other early relays were on small VPS that wouldn’t scale well and many people can’t justify paying for them out of their own pocket as they need to scale up. I think longer term most relays will need to move to a paid subscription or pay per event type model to remain viable.
Okay I’m using your now lol