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.