Damus’ goal from day one has always been to give individuals complete control over the types of interactions they want to have. Algorithms, users, and advertisers do not have authority over individual preferences.

If a user doesn’t want to receive zaps, they can not add a lightning address to their profile. Now if they don’t want to receive likes, they can turn them off.

In the future users will also be able to turn off replies unless they are subject to certain conditions, such as if they are friends or only zap comments.

If you don’t like users who use these features, you don’t have to follow them. I still think you should try to respect users preferences even if you disagree with them. Just my 2 sats ✌️

I will have remove that and create my own image host. This is unacceptable. My bad.

What is stopping me from running a relay that has code to whitelist other relays like you could on mastodon?

Yeah, I think docker has its perks. It makes it easy to deploy stuff and all. It's also great if you are running a VPS with multiple services and you don't want to deal with those services conflicting with each other.

That said, I just think that a relay that's designed for small groups should be as simple and straightforward as possible. Not relying on docker for deployment could reduce the maintenance overhead and headaches while troubleshooting.

There are bunch of relays out there but most of them are in the very early stages of development. I think most relays use either one of the three: nostr-rs-relay, strfry or nostream.

Hey, thanks for the response.

I think one of the biggest points to improve on relay implementations is the ease of deployment. Right now, it's still a bit arcane to manage your own relay and a lot of them still rely on docker magic to make them work.

I'm not sure if this is a controversial take but I always view a project's reliance on docker as a sign that it's gone a bit unwieldy and complex. Aside from that, it's also hard and messy to troubleshoot docker containers when things go wrong.

If I'm to ponder about it, my ideal "small group" nostr relay would just be a plain package that someone with little experience can install using their distro's package manager, with standard config files under /etc and a basic rc/systemd script that starts and manages it.

Welcome new folks! I’ve been getting these questions a lot in the past couple of days so here we go:

1. What are zaps?

Zaps are receipts of bitcoin lightning payments to posts or profiles on nostr (the name of the underlying protocol). By attaching a lightning address to your profile via a wallet like wallet of satoshi, you can send and receive any amount of money to anyone in the world in under a second. This is all possible without any intermediaries. Its uncensorable money over an uncensorable speech protocol.

2. What are relays and why do we need them?

Relays are regular servers and regular databases. When posting notes or following users, it sends your notes/contact list/profile/etc to multiple relays at once controlled by different people. We do it this way because we believe no one should have the ability to unilaterally deplatform you.

3. How do you make money

Still trying to figure that out.

I've seen a bunch of nostr relay implementations that focus on high performance, high throughput scenarios.

While those can be great for large public relays, I hope someone takes the torch and makes a simple and easy to deploy relay that focuses on individuals and small groups.

That's why you post to multiple relays

They aren't