You can view today's love stream here https://live.pleb.cloud/play/23

Welcome to the nostr relay community! Created for relay operators and those wanting to learn more about relays.

We are very happy with our relays performance in the recent #grownostr additions. Like other platforms we are always battling spam and bad bots. Will be updating our site with the relays we stream from. All are run through our filters for blatent spam or unsolicited comment bots. You still need to fine tune your preferences in your client of choice. Current relays we stream with: ``` relay.damus.io purplepag.es relay.snort.social nostr.wine nos.lol nostr21.com relay.wellorder.net nostr.mom ``` More to come in our site updates to coincide with the new relay builds. Please DM us any other relay suggestions or if a relay operator, feel free to stream up/down to our relays.

مرحبًا بك في كل الأشخاص الجدد على nostr https://relayable.org

We have added some more shitcoin spam bots to the filtering and active measures. #nostr #grownostr Feel free to submit any note IDs or npubs to us via DM. Our honeypot accounts might miss some examples in the wild.

>> June 2023 Report << Hosting costs: $905.03 USD Sats donated: 1,773,202 ($532.05 USD) Total unique relay users across all six geo relays: 110,151 This is a 33% increase over May! 💪 In June we had a Canadian server donated with 3 more being donated for July! This will help us reach a break-even point sooner. We applied for grants early May but never heard back so pursing more sponsors to donate servers. We plan to be off AWS by August! 🎉 Our updated relays now block common shitcoin and comment spam. You may still need to mute/report in client but this should alleviate the brunt of it. Please DM us with any examples. Thanks for the 🫂💜🤙PV!

UPDATE: We have temporarily taken down a few of our relays to upgrade and re-import databases. This does not impact availability but monitoring is paused. They will be added back once upgraded. We are also working on our end of the month report on usage and fundraising will be sharing soon. Thanks to everyone for your support!💜🫂

Good discussion with @rabble, Christine Lemmer-Webber (ActivityPub), and Golda Velez (BlueSky) on Open Social Media. byMEDLab @ CU Boulder We are linking directly to Rabble's section but the whole session is worth watching! 🤙

UPDATE: We have finished our testing or new relay build and are moving forward with upgrading our other 6 geo relays. Working on a more detailed blog post but wanted to touch on the changes we have made. Thanks to everyone who has manually added the node for testing! (wss://ca.relayable.org) Spam and bot prevention we've been testing is a five pronged approach: 1) IP blocking for known spam IPs at the firewall/WAF level (have seen bots sending 2GB+ of data per day to relays) 2) Keyword blocks for explicitly spam post keywords ($hitcoins, airdrops, etc) 3) Antiduplicate filtering for automated repetative spam 4) Rate-limiting for posting (non-human achievable speeds) 5) Manual review (e.g. user reported spam/bots we review case by case) We are blocking some bots that do comment spamming. It is our belief that if you wish to interact with "AI" (e.g. LLMs) it should be user initiated. Not a bot commenting on your posts in an unsolicited manner. We've resumed streaming from other relays as well. For one of the largest we block on average 250 events every 5 minutes. If you feel we have blocked or not blocked something in error please DM us the info (npubs and/or note IDs) and we'll address it transparently.

UPDATE: We've deployed our first updated relay with improved spam prevention and syncing to our other relays in the network. This server also represents our first steps in making our network even more resilient and heterogeneous by using a new colocation server in Montreal, Canada, donated by @plebcloud. We have firewall IP rules for known spammers and antiduplication, rate-limiting, and banned lists (known spam like airdrops and bot comments). The server is not added to our geo latency DNS, but you can add using wss://ca.relayable.org. It synced with our other relays and will still have the same content. Please provide any feedback to us via DM.

Friendly reminder... #relayable

UPDATE: We have stopped streaming from relays that were hit by the recent spam attacks. Tomorrow we are deploying our upgraded relays which apply our policies to relays we stream from. Once deployed we will reenable our streaming from other relays. We also have the offending IPs of who was doing the spam attack. More on that to come. 💜🤙