Nostr Web Client

We've had a lot of talk about relays over the past day here on Nostr. This may be a bit confusing if you're new to Nostr.

What's going on with this discussion and why are many people making comments, jokes, or memes about relays?

The argument boils down to centralization and decentralization. On Nostr, we decentralize our infrastructure by using a potential wide variety of servers. Many of us are reading this note right now that's been retrieved from a variety of servers or as we call them, relays. Some relays are more popular than others. This leads to the questions surrounding decentralization. If many users are only using a top subset of relays, then we're not as decentralized as we could be or maybe even as decentralized as we should be.

I have various opinions on this subject. Even if Nostriches mostly only use ten relays, we're still magnitudes better than any existing social platform where only one entity runs the server infrastructure. We can do better though and we should do better. We have the tools to and the capabilities to make Nostr even more decentralized.

Now, this gets us into the next discussion. Which method of decentralization is best? For that, again, in my opinion, I'm a fan of the Gossip model. Simple put, Gossip makes relay selection not overly matter all that much. You can use any relay that you'd like and your follower's clients essentially fetch the notes and events from the relays that are being used without the need to be utilizing the same relay for communication to flow.

What should you do? Nothing, IMO. Relay selection and discovery aren't that great on most clients. I'd say keep using the same relays that you're using for now. Maybe, at some point, you'll update your relays to use smaller, community relays. For now, this is a developer problem to solve. You just keep creating notes and sending zaps. It will all work out in the end. Our developers LOVE to have problems to solve. Pura vida!

miggymofongo ☆彡 1y ago

I recently spun up a strfry instance for my tribe and appreciate the recent discourse about our roles in the Nostr ecosystem. Socializing with Nostr represents a fundamental shift in how we've been doing it over the Internet for the last couple decades. It is not about going viral or everyone seeing your content all the time. That's the centralized, corporate platform way of doing things. I see the fact that some clients start you off with a list of popular relays as a way for new folk to see that there is activity in here. What's dope about Nostr is that you can choose what relays to subscribe too.

Communities coalesce around information and experiences that are "relayed" to its members. Relays are "central" to the experience because they hold the notes communities are coalescing around. The fact that there are currently a few popular relays doesn't make Nostr "centralized" in a corporate platform type of way. It just means we need more community builders to run relays.

My onboarding strategy is to start small then grow outward. I usually tell my friends to delete all the relays the clients start you off with and only add mine so they are not put off by all the libertarians and bitcoiners (I have a lot of liberal anti-bitcoin friends 😆). I'll then suggest individuals for them to follow with content that I think they will like so they can build their feeds up.

There's a bit of hand holding and complaining about the technicality of the relays and long npubs at first. I try to send npubs and relays as separate messages so folk can easily copy/paste into their client. What keeps them coming back to drop a like on my notes is the fact that I'm here and they want to be in community with me. We won't build a robust ecosystem without a solid foundation of small, close knit communities built around relays that are tailored to the folk they are relaying information to.

I'm excited to contribute to the evolution of relay software with my experience and want to hear more about those of folk running smaller relays for their tribes.

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