Agreed, I’ve definitely had that same question.
I definitely wanna hack on this.
I know you can query relay metadata. And people can publish relay lists. I’m wondering if relays can currently state in their metadata some concept of “communities” that the relay is “intended for”
Something optional that just indicates what the relay’s host wants to attract. They wouldn’t boot people based on this, they’d just be raising their hand so that people can find the relay based on interests/identity/locale/etc.
If that already exists then I’ll just build a relay discovery tool that aggregates this info in a way that’s searchable by Nostr users.
If not I may try to add a NIP for it / set a pattern and see if people are interested even before a NIP.
What do you think?
Yeah I’ve been thinking about that too.
I started building a relay explorer so that I could inspect what’s in a relay (and eventually query for things like communities or relay lists or other items that help with discovering more Nostr folks)
It makes me think I’ll wanna add the ability to not just inspect a relay but discover relays.
Would that aid in the effort of balkanisation?
nostr:note1yaqlvj8zr4nwk0jf77qn55jpg3efdymcz87ryfk0lzvavhz4zyus4zaf5g
What would making relays a first class citizen look like? I’m hugely in favor of a swarm of small, dumb relays. Really helps decentralise and add censorship resistance
Built a simple relay explorer client: https://github.com/gregorygmwhite/nostr-relay-explorer
It runs on the user's browser so it'll also respect their access to relays thar are\ behind a VPN or other network-based access control.
Currently it's pretty simple, just allows you to enter a relay, an author's pubkey (optional), and a selection of kinds of events (optional).
I wanted to have this so I could see more about what's in my private relay and see what's missing from before I set up my private relay.
Hoping to clean it up a bit and host it for folks to use if anyone is interested. But for now you can run it locally pretty easily (instructions in the readme).
Feedback and contributions welcome!
Future plans:
1. Add support for better handling of limits for filter results.
2. Support filtering by tags (answering questions like "who have I been in threads with)
3. Add utilities/options to take on events that come back from a query (like being able to select one of the events and broadcast them to a specific relay, like my private one 😉)
If anyone has built something similar let me know. I’m happy to contribute instead of building from scratch, but I didn’t see anything in my googling.
Built a simple relay explorer client: https://github.com/gregorygmwhite/nostr-relay-explorer
It runs on the user's browser so it'll also respect their access to relays thar are\ behind a VPN or other network-based access control.
Currently it's pretty simple, just allows you to enter a relay, an author's pubkey (optional), and a selection of kinds of events (optional).
I wanted to have this so I could see more about what's in my private relay and see what's missing from before I set up my private relay.
Hoping to clean it up a bit and host it for folks to use if anyone is interested. But for now you can run it locally pretty easily (instructions in the readme).
Feedback and contributions welcome!
Future plans:
1. Add support for better handling of limits for filter results.
2. Support filtering by tags (answering questions like "who have I been in threads with)
3. Add utilities/options to take on events that come back from a query (like being able to select one of the events and broadcast them to a specific relay, like my private one 😉)
Has anyone written a script to pull all events for a public key from a list of relays and copy them to another relay?
I wanna take what I’ve posted before I had my own private relay and copy it to my private relay so I have a complete backup.
I imagine this may be a common utility and if no one has written it I think I’ll do that today.
Yeah that’s a tempting way to solve the problem but then you’re compromising on decentralization. I dunno if we can have our cake and eat it too on this one.
Testing to see if this gets stored on my umbrel personal relay
Hoping to start contributing to Nostr projects. Anyone have a small-medium size projects they need doing?
I can do backend and DevOps work (im shit at typescript, and know nothing of mobile dev)
If not I saw some issues on snort’s repo I’d start with, but wondering if there’s any recommendations.
Also upon further research, It looks as if, moving forward, NIPS-05 will provide a way for the relays at which users reside can be identified:
https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/05.md
So perhaps some service around relay operators combining their data can be created or something to create a large directory of some sorts?
Back before search engines people published physical magazines that had printed links to new or noteworthy websites.
These zines were usually themed (skateboarding, electronics, golf, etc)
I wonder if we need to do something similar now. Newsletters like “this week in Nostr” or “what’s new on golf Nostr” (if such a concentration exists for that community today)
That’s a very good point.
I keep thinking of Nostr as one big social network. But it seems like it may end up functioning like many social networks that you can do some work to jump between if you want to be involved across many contexts.
Thanks for taking the time to answer. Are there any resources (people to follow, blogs to read and podcasts to listen to) that could help me avoid pestering people to learn more about Nostr?
(I’m through the NIPs and have been reading the code of a few projects)
Agreed, I love Nostr and all it represents. This may just be an inevitable trade off of a decentralised system. I’m not even sure if this is a problem (especially not yet) 😂
But I can imagine if relays start talking together, that may make it impossible to run a small relay (too much to store that’s possibly irrelevant to users that actually use that relay)
nostr:npub180cvv07tjdrrgpa0j7j7tmnyl2yr6yr7l8j4s3evf6u64th6gkwsyjh6w6 I’m trying to understand the whole nostr protocol in depth (reading all the NIPs and reading the code for common open source clients and relays)
One thing I’m wondering is, at some point in the adoption curve of Nostr wont it be difficult to be subscribed to enough relays to know all the conversations that may mention you?
Especially if paid relays become the default (which makes sense), wont we have to subscribe to a large cross section to make sure we get alerted to all @ mentions?
PS if there are people to follow or podcasts / blogs that talk about Nostr at a technical level I’d love to do my own research, but I’m not sure where to go.
Seems like Bitcoin (and especially lightning) is generally a threat to the App Store business model.
Play it out, if we are allowed to send sats freely. Apple won’t be able to enforce taking their cut for anything done via iOS unless they allow Apple Pay to use Bitcoin and Lightning.
So I’m not surprised they’re trying to squash it.
There is appettite, the https://nos.lol/ people seem to be thinking about these things. I personally think it is better to restrict it to relays directly otherwise we risk becoming a Bluesky.
Makes sense. 🤔 it’s all just trade offs at the end of the day. I’ll check them out. Thanks!
Is there any appetite for a client architecture which has some application layer between the the app and relay?
That way there’s some ability to add some of that filtering / configurability without putting that entire burden on the user’s device
Does that talk about how the chain is being polluted with NFTs?
I feel dumb for asking but I thought we fought the block wars to keep block sizes at 1MB
How are people making multiple megabyte blocks by adding NFTs?
Is there a paper or article I can read about it?