I'd like to get some more friends from Facebook over to Nostr, and I am making a series of posts for those who do not have a clue. How does this post on relays look to you FOR THEM? #asknostr

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What Are Nostr Relays? (In Simple Terms)

If you've heard about Nostr, the decentralized social network, you might have come across the term "relays." But what are they, and why do they matter? Let’s break it down in the simplest way possible.

🚀 Think of Nostr Like Email, But Public

Imagine you're sending an email. Normally, your message goes through a central email server (like Gmail or Outlook). But with Nostr, instead of one company controlling the server, you can choose where your messages go—this is where relays come in.

🔌 Relays Are Like Mail Servers for Nostr

A relay is just a computer (server) that stores and shares messages (posts) between users. When you send a post on Nostr, you’re actually sending it to one or more relays. Other people who are connected to the same relays can see your post.

🏠 You Can Choose Which Relays to Use

Unlike Twitter or Facebook, which store your posts on their own servers, Nostr lets you pick and use multiple relays. Some relays are public and free, while others are private or require a small fee to keep spam out.

💡 Why Are Relays Important?

No Single Point of Failure – Your posts aren't lost if one relay goes down. You can use another relay.

More Freedom – No one can delete or ban your account across all relays.

Better Performance – Some relays might be faster or better maintained, and you can choose the best ones for you.

🔑 Final Thought: You Control Your Data

In traditional social media, companies decide what stays online. With Nostr and relays, you control where your posts live and who can see them. It’s a new way of thinking about online communication—more open, more resilient, and more in your hands.

Want to get started? Sign up for a Nostr account. Connect to your favorite client. Find some good relays, connect to them, and start posting! 🚀

As a result of all my thoughts and experiments, I've concluded that I can't find any optimal way to effectively earn money and maintain a high flow. It turns out that when you increase the commission, at some point the number of transactions drops significantly, but you earn more, and this happens not regularly but in bursts. It's very difficult to determine where you're right and where you're not. Therefore, I got fed up with all of this, abandoned it, and set fixed commissions on the channels. Initially, I set them to zero entirely, and the flow increased significantly. Now, if memory serves me right, my commission is 10 ppm, and about the same flow is occurring as when commissions were completely zero, but now I'm earning around $5-10 per day. It's possible to earn more, of course, but I just got tired of constantly changing the code and adjusting commissions.

Of course, when talking about earnings, it's important to keep in mind that I'm simply taking the numbers from the commissions. But you have to consider that every day some channels close randomly or at the request of the remote party, some channels get severed due to protocol mismatches with the remote side, or sometimes I open channels to nodes with which I don't have existing channels, and satoshis are also spent on that. So it seems like all earnings are being consumed.

But there's an interesting point. As you know, you can buy a channel on my website, and that server, LND, which manages it, has been showing me over the past few years that, in total, more than one Bitcoin has been accumulated from all the payments for opening channels. I keep track of these statistics; I don't have the data on hand right now, but it's roughly around one and a half Bitcoin earned already. This includes the amount I'm trying to cover for opening and future closing of channels, as well as the percentage I set in my source code based on the size of the channel.

So, in principle, you can probably earn money, perhaps by selling channel capacity rather than earning from commissions. Moreover, you have to consider that over the entire time my network has been running, which is about six and a half years, the difference between what I can get back when closing all channels and what I put into the system shows that I've lost approximately 3.3 Bitcoin. This includes several instances where my nodes were penalized and all funds were confiscated. There were also moments when there was a bug in the LND server, and breaches occurred. If memory serves, this amounts to about 0.8 Bitcoin in total. The rest consists of funds spent on commissions, opening, and subsequently closing cooperative or force-closed channels, which I was very actively opening in the beginning.

Version 0.9.2 is rolling out.

You can now select a specific channel as the first hop for your Lightning payments. Combined with setting the last hop, this feature also serves for channel rebalancing.

Version 0.9.2 is rolling out.

You can now select a specific channel as the first hop for your Lightning payments. Combined with setting the last hop, this feature also serves for channel rebalancing.

Crazy. You’d think that would be the first thing you try.

I'm finding Ubuntu Long Term Stable to be a bit lacking in the Stable part lately. Thinking about switching and decided to #asknostr what #linux distros are recommended these days.

Debian seems like the obvious transition. What else is there? I want to be able to tinker when I want to tinker but I also want it to just keep working the way I left it in between uses. Ubuntu has been too crashy. I've been a linux user for decades so I'm not interested in a full grandma safe hand hold first time away from windows distro.

Lots of forum posts equals solid LLM help for my tinkering, so size of userbase is being considered.

Want to make sure my new wallet set up is working correct.

69 sats each to the first five comments on this note.

The rules:

1. You leave a comment on this note.

2. I zap you 21 sats and reply.

3. You zap 21 sats to my reply, and reply to my reply.

4. I zap you 69 sats.