Are we building the best WoT Search relay out there? Probably.
A relay that has everything: spam, scams, slop... all of it. But REQs and Search only return results from each user's wider network (follows-of-follows, 12 hops deep, minus mutes and reports). So, if a scammer or bot network uses the relay, they'll get the scam network. If a real human uses it, they'll get the network around them. Everyone stays happy.
And since it uses NIP-85 trust providers, you can choose any algorithm to score your network by any provider. Just subscribe to one and it will work automatically.
It's your WoT, not the relay operator's WoT.
It fixes Nostr without centralizing anywhere.
Replies (21)
It sounds confusing. You are the expert. All we want is for imad to stop annoying me. Hope you can accomplish it.
12 hops?
Follows of follows of follows.. 12 times up
twelve degrees of Kevin Bacon, that seems excessive
you and who?
Probably, but you can choose a trust provider with less if you want
That sounds interesting... And really beneficial. Though search generally sucks across the Nostr. Anything that improves searh is immediately a win.
This is "web of follows" not "web of trust." I don't follow anyone, so it's useless for me. "Web of trust" would be like letting me select who I trust to tag verified humans, and then letting those people tag verified humans, which no app does because it would be too good.
Then you can just find a provider that considers other things like the people you reply to.. it's up to you.
That is good
When do you expect this relay to be available? If you share when it goes live, I’d like to test it as a search relay in one of my own Nostr projects. The idea of letting each user bring their own WoT instead of inheriting the relay operator’s trust model is especially interesting to me.
Create an account on brainstorm.world first so you have a NIP85 provider and I can send you the urls for the staging relay we are working on. It is still early, but it already works.
I actually share that concern. I’d still be interested in using it as a search relay, but if the relay stores everything, then spam that matches the topic I’m searching for could still end up in the result set unless the WoT filtering is strong enough. So for me the real test would be search quality under heavy spam, not just whether the relay can technically return results.
For my project, what I really need is a working relay URL that I can connect to directly. If I also need to build separate NIP 85 provider logic just to make search work, the search part of the project starts becoming much bigger than I intended. I’m happy to test the staging relay, but ideally I need an endpoint I can integrate as a normal search relay first. If that works, I can look at the NIP 85 side afterwards.
You can search without any nip 85, but then any search relay would work. You don't need us for that. We specialize in web of trust. The point of the relay is to have a filter by trust. Otherwise it would just be a regular nip 50 search relay.
I think I misunderstood you earlier. So if I understand correctly, my client can still talk to your relay like a normal NIP 50 search relay, while the NIP 85 provider is what gives your relay the trust data needed to filter the results. Does my application need to implement any NIP 85 specific logic itself, or is it enough for my npub to subscribe to a provider like Brainstorm and then connect to your relay normally? If it is the second case, that is actually exactly what I need.
All your users can select their sources of trust independently. Your app doesn't need to do anything special besides authenticating with our nip 50 relay and making sure users have their outbox relay lists set correctly so we can find and index their events.
I created an account on Brainstorm. What should I do next? Do I need to subscribe to a specific NIP 85 provider or configure anything before I can test your staging relay? If you send me the relay URL and the next steps, I can try integrating it into my project.
Cool. The server is processing, let me wait to finish and then I can connect the production brainstorm to our staging search relay and will send you a link
Sounds good. I’ll wait for the relay URL then. Once you send it, I’ll try it in my project and see how the search behaves.
Try it out on a desktop:
SearchOverTrust
Nostr search, ranked by your web of trust.
Same url is the relay. You have to auth with your user to see posts in your web of trust.
