what on earth is Damus doing... checking the relays for these spam posts i'm seeing, they're only getting posted to free relays, and my only free relays are via proxy.nostr.wine which is social graph filtered. even when i disable that and only view paid relays, i'm still seeing these spam posts... that the relay checker tells me shouldn't be visible to me... 🤨
hm, spam bots are making it through on the global timeline again...
Nostr gang is a bit more "cash, whisky and tattoos" than Mastodon gang
https://nrcheck.tigerville.no could probably be expanded into a more general diagnostics and tracing tool.
i could optimise the checker a bit more. i'm trying to not go too crazy on how many relays it talks to at once so it does them in parallel groups of 16 promises but it should ideally just fire up 16 workers that run in a loop and pick from the list.
Nostr relays work better than assumed. it's just that there aren't any tools for thoroughly checking that they work. except now i made one.
so, using https://nrcheck.tigerville.no, it looks like 3 in 4 paid relays are working:
wss://nostr.wine
wss://relay.orangepill.dev
wss://nostr.plebchain.org
one seems to not ever publish anything despite me paying them:
wss://eden.nostr.land
it's among the first relays listed in most clients, but i'm not seeing posts from it in the wild all too often. maybe it's just really slow and all the clients time out on it?
cleaned up the code for the relay checker a little. it gives you a bit more progress information as it's checking now: https://nrcheck.tigerville.no
#[2] ^^^
cleaned up the code for the relay checker a little. it gives you a bit more progress information as it's checking now: https://nrcheck.tigerville.no
hm, i tried it on one of your replies and it's working for me
yeah, i was wondering the same thing, lol, i'll get that fixed, but for now, just go get it in the JSON/raw data, if your client lets you find that.
okay, *that's* better. i think i got my relay checker at https://nrcheck.tigerville.no working properly now and it seems i'm actually getting published to a lot of relays. far more than any client i use can see.
my relay checker needs to be smarter about slow relays, because connection timeouts for WebSockets are pretty long, so it stalls the list. i can't connect to 300+ relays all at once, but waiting for each one to connect isn't useful either. i might want to do them in batches...
i asked the owner of nostr.wine, who said my posts were coming through fine.
👌
a good number of these relays i'm checking are so slow they're virtually useless so you wonder why even run a relay at that point.
full source code so far - this is how https://nrcheck.tigerville.no checks if relays can see an event ID right now 
okay, SOME of the big ones do respond, but several do not
none of the big relays seem to respond when i query them for my posts.