-
@ Alejandro
2024-01-20 18:58:40"Relays are like the backend servers for Nostr. They allow Nostr clients to send them messages, and they may (or may not) store those messages and broadcast those messages to all other connected clients."
— nostr.how
Decentralization, and the freedom that comes with it, is the main reason why I love Nostr.
At the same time, decentralization is its main weakness.
With Nostr, there is no central server or company to take care of everything for you. You're in charge of your experience when using Nostr clients.
What are Nostr relays
When you use X, Instagram, Threads or Facebook, your client attempts to share your information with the world by uploading it to the servers operated by these companies.
These companies then monetize you (by means of your data) and decide who, if anyone, should see your information. You don't have control over who ends up seeing your posts or if your posts are seen at all.
Nostr stops this madness.
Your Nostr client shares your information by publishing events to Nostr relays that you choose. Later on, your followers request your events from relays of their choosing.
As long as you and your followers have one relay in common, they will receive your events and you will be able to share your thoughts without anyone being able to censor you or tell you who can or can't see your thoughts, pictures, etc.
Herein is the power and the weakness of Nostr.
The power and the reason why Nostr is censorship resistant is that if a Nostr relay refuses to serve your events to your followers, you can publish your events to a different relay. Not a big deal.
The weakness is that you now need to manage a list of relays, monitor them for good behavior and hope that your followers also include at least one of your relays on their list.
Optimizing your relays for experience
When I started using Nostr, one of the big questions was what relays to use and how many?
When you open a client, or refresh your feed, the client needs to query all the relays that you have configured for events from the people you follow, merge the data from all those relays and build a cohesive view that is, for example, ordered based on publishing time.
This means that the longer the list of relays you configure on your client, the longer you will have to wait to get that view.
But what if you have too few relays? What will happen then? Will you be missing events from people you follow? Will they miss your events?
https://i.nostr.build/0Z49.jpg
My relay configuration
nostr.wine has solved this problem for me.
Developed by Katie and Mazin, nostr.wine offers a set of free and paid relay servers that solve this conundrum.
nostr.wine This is a regular paid relay. It costs money to run relays and so it makes sense to pay for their usage. Remember: freedom is not free.
Go to https://nostr.wine to subscribe to the nostr.wine relay for a one-time fee of 18,888 sats.
filter.nostr.wine This is the key relay. This relay aggregates and publishes events from and to a wide range of public relays so that I only need to query one relay but I get the benefit of being connected to a large set of relays.
The subscription is time based with a minimum of 30 days. I subscribed for 2 years for 120,000 sats and I'm happy to support the Nostr developer community.
Go https://nostr.wine/add-time to add time and test this relay.
welcome.nostr.wine wss://welcome.nostr.wine is a free and read-only relay that only aggregates events from new nostr users and displays them in the global/universe view.
This is a great way to get exposed to new users. Take the opportunity to welcome them and maybe give them a follow.
nostr.land I'm also subscribed to a second paid Nostr relay to spread the love to the Nostr developer community.
Here is my current list of relays: - wss://welcome.nostr.wine - wss://nostr.wine - wss://filter.nostr.wine/npub1er0k46yxcugmp6r6mujd5qvp75yp72m98fs6ywcs2k3kqg3f8grqd9py3m?broadcast=true - wss://eden.nostr.land
> Do you have a different relay configuration that you prefer? Please share it in the comments section.
Notable notes
nostr:note134psu0r0y40pc5yarchx6ycj7e86tj8gnfv4f8hfj8uhs3ddjg5sa4xury
note:note1zppeq00vuqkzvyevg9gnfjwazn688044e4e8jj5g5nv65c6lmlcqap8sm8
Recommendations
Katie Ann Baker and Mazin Khoury
nostr:npub1qlkwmzmrhzpuak7c2g9akvcrh7wzkd7zc7fpefw9najwpau662nqealf5y and nostr:npub18kzz4lkdtc5n729kvfunxuz287uvu9f64ywhjz43ra482t2y5sks0mx5sz are busy making Nostr the place for social interactions.
They are now onboarding creators to https://creatr.nostr.wine/, a place for creators to share AND monetize their work with freedom.
You can follow Mazin here and Katie here.
What did you think of today's newsletter?
Your feedback helps me create the best newsletter possible for you.
Please leave a comment and checkout comments from other subscribers and readers. I love hearing from the Bitcoin For Families community ❤️ 🙏🏻
See you again next week! — Alejandro
This newsletter is for educational purposes. It does not represent financial advice. Do your own research before buying Bitcoin.