I've been starting to realize that I don't think I can sustain the free relay offchain.pub by myself long-term, even with funds from the pay-to-relay bitcoiner.social. Nostr relays will need to host files for applications like "github on nostr" and at a certain point I will need to experiment with non-free models for that to work.
This is based on my naive/late realization yesterday that you can trivially include base64 encoded data in a nostr event. That use case will accelerate the server capacity demand growth, probably by A LOT.
A couple things might give me time to delay ending the free model:
- aggressively expiring events off of the relay
- blocking base64 data, which is text like this: Qm9yZWQgYXBlIHNoaXQK
Both options really suck and I don't like the idea of doing either really. Frankly, I really doubt blocking it is possible without at least a high cost in terms of compute. I mean how many cpu cycles do you think it'll take to regex that? Nevermind the inevitable porn-on-nostr that is now going to be hosted by the relay itself, and the operator liability concerns that come along with hosting files. I do want that level of freedom for us all, but if that's the game we're playing I need to spin off another nym for that and do it on a whole new relay for my own opsec.
Anyway, I'm not doing anything imminently, yet. Just thinking out loud here.
I heard about Podverse recently, so I'm finally trying out Alby in firefox to connect to my core lightning node. By default they provide a cloud hosted websocket, but I found their pull request and saw it's just #[0] 's ln-ws-proxy. I'm running that (with nginx) on my node now and have a fully self-hosted direct connection to my lightningd from firefox. Now I can stream podcasts and boost straight out of my own wallet. Fully non-custodial and even without the cloud proxy. Now that's 🤙⚡️
GitHub
GitHub - jb55/ln-ws-proxy: A websockets to lightning proxy
A websockets to lightning proxy. Contribute to jb55/ln-ws-proxy development by creating an account on GitHub.
Started working on a metrics collector utility and a dashboard with relay stats for Nostream.
nip05 script added two new verified nip05 users today!
#[0] and #[1]
nostr is a little weird so you may not see their nip05 @bitcoiner.social address until a relay you use has their published event 0 that I am seeing on our relay.
The script is pulling directly from postgres now so it's basically instantaneous. I'll keep running it manually for awhile to add more safety logic before putting it on a cronjob or tying it to updates directly (wouldn't that be cool?)
Just saw a base64 encoded image in a kind:0 event with 'picture': 'data:image/jpeg;base64,...
I'd rather avoid running an image hosting service
If you can’t reach nostr.bitcoiner.social, it’s because that subdomain was deprecated today. The public relay was renamed to wss://offchain.pub
Update your relays. I know most people won’t, but it’s all good. In hindsight, deciding what domains to use by a poll on the bird app is not great ops practice lol.
Bitcoiner.social users,
If you don't already have a nip05 address, just set your nip05 to whatever@bitcoiner.social, and the next time my nip-05 script runs it will add you to our verified index (.well-known/nostr.json).
Working on nostr is so ridiculously simple. This evening I thought to write a simple script to provide nip-05 verification to users on bitcoiner.social. There's just this feeling of amazement and joy to connect to my own relay and do stuff. This is way too fun. This script is already done and probably totally reckless too but what the hell.
Updated nostream on bitcoiner.social to v1.22.3
derp, just fixed my NIP-11 which had the npub rather than the specified 32-byte hex.
Already seeing meaningful amounts of traffic growth on bitcoiner.social, and it's only going to accelerate with this new global feature on Damus! We're barely just getting started. Since I've built the server using Ansible, it'll be a breeze to migrate to dedicated bare metal soon. In leu of (paying for) that, I'll be raising the admission fee to 4200 sats in an hour.
So it’s 2k sats for one more hour. About 1:15pm PDT or 21:15 utc.
Switching back to Damus for awhile. The new global is 🤙⚡️
What's good for self-hosting a lightning address that works with lightningd?
I've done it with lnd before, and I know lnurl-commando is a thing.
They have inpainting and outpainting without needing to use a masking tool now.
I am loving infrastructure as code. Upgrading nostream is just incrementing the version number and running my playbook again. I even put an upgrade tag so that I can do "--tags upgrade" and skips everything unrelated to the upgrade. A year ago I was still doing everything in bash scripts. There's still a place for that, but ansible is 🤙