The two relays I operated have gone kablooie from the internet. I had been contemplating shutting them down because the vast majority of the traffic seems to be scrapers, and I can't afford to run a VPS to serve useless noise. In the process of moving the data to another, smaller VPS, I accidentally deleted the files, and there's no backup. So much for that plan! I don't think I'll run another relay. Altruism isn't appreciated -- people just want a place to spam and/or hoover up all the data. Unfortunately, the scrapers continue to hammer the server, trying to connect. They seem not smart enough to give up on a relay that isn't responding. I hope they eventually do.

I wonder if #[0] left nostr because he realized it's trivial for the NSA to hoover up the whole firehose of traffic and probably geolocate anybody they wanted to.

New Rule: Every creature deserves the right to a restful night's sleep, uninterrupted by the lights, noises, and radiation from industrial civilization.

Returning after several weeks, every nostr client seems broken – feeds aren't loading or clients aren't displaying anything. Ah well. I'm going for a walk.

I also think it’s important for public relays to exist, for people who can’t or don’t want to pay, or for new accounts with no social network. I would prefer to implement features that mitigate automated spam, while remaining open to human users. Adaptive throttling is already implemented. What other ideas are effective? note1n694et2k56xdx8mhpt6hxkm97m823ry6s7nruz00hd8egl89hs2qcmntl9

The next feature I’ll add to #python nostr-relay will be “dynamic allow lists”, so that relay operators can specify nostr queries, and every “p” tag in the returned events will be allowed to post to the relay. This is a generalization of the “friend of a friend” feature. It would allow for many other policies, based on whether a user has paid, or some other rule I can’t imagine.

nostr relay: Social Network

The TwitterFiles have revealed a vast censorship industrial complex, involving collusion between governments, corporations, academia, media, and NGOs. Institutions are waging information warfare against their own citizens. People are earning high salaries as censors or “internet hall monitors”, and they all seem to think they’re doing something important and good. It’s the banality of evil.

I wish clients did a better job of indicating whether and where an event was saved. I often hit "send", and then the event seems to go nowhere. That's frustrating.

Big release for #python nostr-relay today! * Added full-text index, compatible with NIP-50 * Added the purple server – the fastest way to serve nostr websockets... * Added validator to limit "hellthreads" * Enabled NIP-05 identity provider for LMDB backend * Made many micro-optimizations to the LMDB backend and json handling. * Improved compatibility with python < 3.11 * Consolidated and improved query validation Changelog:

nostr relay: CHANGES

And a new document on performance tuning tips:

nostr relay: Performance

New version of aionostr supports the `naddr` type. So you can run this to retrieve the event: aionostr get naddr1qqqqzxrhwden5te0wfjkccte9eekummjwsh8xmmrd9skcq3qljxdldrq885zamfkn82k7zcjs4lrsf9wykrh9e3hq4thh89vlzxsxpqqqp65wyu9u7v

Client Challenge

#python nostr-relay 1.11.5 released: * Support prefix id and author searches * Several micro-optimizations in the LMDB backend * Configurable max_limit to limit the number of events returned per REQ. (default: 6000) * Made Homeserver more reliable * Simplified storage of verification status

PyPI

nostr-relay

nostr relay

USGS has a nice web tool for making custom topographical maps of the US. (I wish my local library could print out the 24x29" pages)

topoBuilder

I'm testing my own inbox/outbox style private relay, as described here:

nostr relay: Homeserver

I switched wss://bhagos.org/ to LMDB It's a small VPS, located in Finland. Anyone who is a friend-of-a-friend of me (and several others) can post there. About 9,000 pubkeys are whitelisted...