nostr21.com: a short story about tor connections
It's typically the busiest relay in the cluster, I generally attribute that to it being the oldest. I was looking at it today, trying to figure out "why are there so many connections?"
It has a crude WOA: (3000 npubs) + my follows from 2 years ago, + a paid option for 21 sats. Of which, there are about 50 paid users that paid 21 sats. Total, about 4000 npubs. It has ZERO inbound or outbound relay replication (true organic mode). Doesn't seem like that would be so popular, why would so many be connecting?
Well, I think one answer (of many) is, there is a clear popularity in the connections coming from tor exit nodes (thousands). That's pretty cool! I know amethyst defaults to tor for any outboxing it does, and it's quite possible that nostr21.com and *.nostr1.com are some of the only relays that can serve this kind of traffic because it is optimized *knowing, that IP based naive throttling is only going to cut off access to users that simply want to have some bit of privacy.
So the stack is optimized, to serve these low level connections as fast and efficiently as possible in order to provide a reliable amount of service to all.
Anyway, I thought that was cool. Hope you enjoyed relay story time.
