i'm not sure how to deal with relay.mostr.pub in my Nostr indexer because it has this annoying behaviour where if you subscribe to all NIP-01 (metadata) events, it will regularly broadcast these massive dumps of it. my indexer wants a NIP-02 (contact list) per user, so it sends out a query for that, which means hundreds of queries are queued up all at once.
it's funny how many different names this formula has:
√ a² + b² + c² + ...
in engineering, this is called the RMS (Root-Mean-Square) and is used for measuring average signal strength.
in statistics, it's called the standard deviation and tells you how much variance there is in a set of samples.
in trigonometry, it's the solution to Pythagoras' theorem and it gives length of the hypothenuse of a right-angled triangle.
in vector maths, it's the magnitude of a vector, also known as the euclidean norm.
in complex maths, it's called the absolute value of a complex number.
relay.mostr.pub publishes more profile metadata events than all of the biggest Nostr relays put together.
my nostr indexer - it collects profile data
Nostr isn't the most thought-through protocol. obvious holes everywhere, such as the inability to undo a like.
on the other hand, when people start thinking things through, the result is usually over-engineering, not elegance. engineers suck at elegance, so when you see it, be grateful, because it is a rarity.
somewhat tempted to shift focus away from the Nostr indexer/crawler because people aren't really complaining that my tools are bad because they can't query a central database.
there's another concern i have, which is that the mostr.pub ActivityPub relay doesn't have much visibility.
to even get my Mastodon posts seen on the most common relays, i have to manually broadcast them from my client.
so i'm sort of tempted to write a little daemon that just broadcasts anything it sees on mostr.pub to other relays. maybe just relay.mutinywaller.com, since that broadcasts to pretty much everywhere else...
as a programmer, if you try to read the technical documentation for the Fediverse/Mastodon (the ActivityPub protocol), you can stare at it for quite a long time and still not quite understand it.
it's got a bit of a barrier of entry.
by contrast, it only took me a few minutes to understand the documentation for Nostr - a social medium that has similarities to Mastodon. Jack Dorsey - the former Twitter CEO - is the person who got it off the ground.
as a programmer, i find it very easy to get started with, and fun to play with. ActivityPub feels a bit more bureaucratic by comparison.
in the Nostr protocol, suppose i want to find the contact list for a user and it's turning out to be hard to find. how do i know when to stop looking? should i retry later? how soon? the contact list is optional and so is every other user record, so you don't even know if it exists at all.
still working on that user profile crawler for Nostr. the hardest bit is how to handle pubkeys for profiles that haven't been indexed yet.
how to you prioritise what profiles to index first? which relays do you query for those profiles? do you query certain relays first? do you query one or several relays at once?
i'll find answers to these questions as i move along, but it's pretty tricky stuff.
so i hooked one of those AliExpress "HDMI Video Capture" dongles up to my Linux machine's HDMI output, which actually turned out to work this time. you just have to make sure it's connected when the machine boots, so it knows which video output to send BIOS and console to.
also, it turns out that the preview window in QuickTime Player's built-in Movie Capture mode is a lot less laggy than OBS. i was able to use it as a virtual monitor and type on a keyboard that was attached to the Linux machine.
here's a capture from the dongle:
so i hooked one of those AliExpress "HDMI Video Capture" dongles up to my Linux machine's HDMI output, which actually turned out to work this time. you just have to make sure it's connected when the machine boots, so it knows which video output to send BIOS and console to.
also, it turns out that the preview window in QuickTime Player's built-in Movie Capture mode is a lot less laggy than OBS. i was able to use it as a virtual monitor and type on a keyboard that was attached to the Linux machine.
here's a capture from the dongle:
fun things to do: using a video capture adapter as a sort of KVM for your Linux machine
what is the meaning of
🚕
👨🔬
🥲
so, unfortunately, the mostr.pub bridge to Nostr is down right now, mere hours after i began using it. this is unfortunate. that's one drawback of using a bridge. there's a single point of failure.