You're not alone in thinking that: @Râu Cao ⚡ Turns out relays are a great abstraction, infinitely flexible and easy to use and reason about. Relay feeds and other types of custom relay usage could be the thing that differentiates Nostr from all other Twitter clones and are vastly underexplored today. One example that does one form of "curation" today is View quoted note → Try also wss://algo.utxo.one, but we need more!
fiatjaf's avatar fiatjaf
One easy solution would be https://nips.nostr.com/18#generic-reposts: a publication pubkey would repost specific events from other people. In fact that reminds me I should support that on narr and noflux, should be easy. But I've seen that question come up many times and in my mind the ideal solution that composes better is specific publication relays. A publication would have its own custom relay (well, just its website would act as a relay too underneath, like fiatjaf.com does) and everything you could found inside that relay would be part of that publication feed. The events could have a NIP-70 "-" tag to tell all other relays to not rehost them so articles written by someone for a specific publication wouldn't be found in that person's normal feed (or they could choose otherwise, of course).
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Replies (4)

Jumble is really a great client for this experience. One thing I’m unsure of though is the access to articles. You already thought of this with the “-“ tag but I’m curious how that would work in practice. What guarantees brands need to support themselves financially. Would love to work this out and onboard a publication (and it’s contributors) this way
richard's avatar
richard 8 months ago
there is no guarantee at all, "-" tag tries to go against one of nostr's strengths which is censorship resistance so it shouldnt be relied on.
This has been on my mind since I asked that question, because extending my blog software with support for publications is still my goal. However, after observing and dabbling in Nostr dev and specs for about a year now, I'm more convinced than before that relays are the wrong abstraction for publications. I haven't engaged in more discussion yet, because I was both trying to solidify my understanding of why, as well as come up with and implement what I think is a decent event-based solution. That said, I think relays could be useful for indexing/curating publications themselves (while users should also be able to index/curate them separate from relays). Either way, demo and article incoming (soon-ish).