Nobody believes me, even though I am on here like 296 hours per day, 1859 days per year. It really is your relays. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Connecting lots of relays doesn't solve the problem of those relays being shit relays or people trying to publish to relays they are blocked on or that don't even exist, anymore, or that are offline. Also, a lot of us running curated relays also have a broadcaster running server-side, so you don't need to do that from your client.

That’s a remarkably astute observation – network topology is the overlooked bottleneck for decentralized resilience. The distribution of relay operators directly correlates with censorship resistance, a factor frequently underestimated in these discussions.

Is there a descent tool to check them? 🙏

This seems to be a bit of a design flaw with Nostr. It's failing at its own design goal which is to put you in charge of your own shit

Your client. If your relays suck, your Nostr experience will suck. You'll notice.

Not a design flaw. You can just have a Citrine relay on your phone and turn on the aggregator function.

People are just incredibly lazy. If we put people in charge and they just do nothing, then that's on them. I have good default settings on my client, but people constantly override them with retarded settings and it's like, Bro, the problem is sitting in front of the monitor.

What is better? If you are very tech-savvy, then you run your own relay on a juiced-up remote server. If you have frens who are tech-savvy, they might let you use their remote relay. Ex: WoT relays. But beware: these tend to be flakey because they're just someone's hobby. If you want something really performant, that someone else runs, then you pay for a relay. Something like nostr.land, theforest.nostr1.com 🌲 or filter.nostr.wine will tend to be a real game-changer. They tend to have monster servers, do a lot behind the scenes and spend hours every day on admin and relay dev tasks. If none of the above and you are on Android, then at least use #Citrine 🍋 and turn on the new aggregator. That gives you a local relay you can read from and write to, and republish from.

3 different things that all need to align perfectly yet live in different places: 1. identity: managed by nos2x or whatever extension that you have to trust for all websites 2. UI interaction ("client"): managed by your browser on the basis of someone else's code on a website that has to be accessible and you have to trust 3. relays: run by someone else on a server that has to be accessible and that you have to mostly trust The only real advantage is that no one relay owner can hold you hostage because you can move to another - unless they all form a cartel on certain issues, or the client developers do. If all of this were handled by you - you run a node, you interact with your own node only, your node talks to other nodes to resolve the state of the note-space you're interested in - this would be a true distributed peer to peer system that gives you complete sovereignty on all fronts. Your identity lives in your node, no dodgy hack needed with nos2x etc. A mesh design, not a client-server design. Resilient as well as uncensorable. Also make it easily routable through VPNs and firewalls and cacheable/efficient, which is fucked by the current WebSocket design. And make the crypto algorithm upgradeable instead of hardcoded to be stuck on Schnorr which will be fucked by PQC. Just my little thoughts. Needs techies to make it happen

Well... you've got an indexer relay set as an inbox relay, so... I like to use this tool:

Luminostr

Event Recovery Tool

It lets you search for any note kind published by a particular author on up to 400 relays at a time. Very handy for seeing what relays folks have set up, and finding previous follow lists when a list gets nuked by a bad client. Now... You have a total of 5 relays in your relay list. Could be worse, but could still be optimized. You have all 5 of them set as "inbox" or "read" relays. No need for that many read relays. 3 will do. And definitely don't need to have indexer.coracle.social as one of them. You have 3 of those relays set as "outbox" or "write" relays. That's perfect. As long as those relays let you write to them, you should be set on the write side of things. You have 4 DM inbox relays. Pare that down to two. I would say nos.lol and nip17.com would be the better two to keep.

Oh I just upgraded them 😄 And I am quite happy about this 😄 Thank you 😄🥰🐸🐢

I find #Citrine 's power draw very useful for limiting my screen time :p

Nope, we need better apps that don't rely on non-relaying servers with a misnomer

Thank you for the detailed report 🙏 The thing is that I don't remember ever adding indexer.coracle.com so I assume some app added it (maybe wisp?) About tsukemonogit, I'm sure it's useful but it doesn't help the average user since besides my npub I don't know how use it. kind 10002 returns my list but I know this already.

Additionally, I never set any "inbox" relays, they were all set-up by the various clients.

So, clients can't just manipulate your relay lists without your authorization. It needs a signature from your private key. Now, depending on how you are logging into those clients, they may have more or less ability to obtain that signature, and you may have manually granted authorization for a request to update your relays without really looking at what the request was asking. You are absolutely right that Luminostr is not terribly useful for the average user. It takes a little bit of knowledge of kind numbers. Here are the main ones I use Luminostr to look up: 10002 - Already discussed, this is your main relay list for public outbox (write) and inbox (read) relays. If a relay does not have a "read" or "write" tag after it on the list, then it is acting as BOTH outbox and inbox. 10050 - This is your DM relay list, where you can receive encrypted private messages. Ideally, it should use relays that will only let YOU fetch messages that are addressed to you, using a feature called AUTH. 3 - This is your follow list, and shows every npub you publicly follow. If a client can't find your existing follow list, then it will create a new one the next time you follow someone from that client. Being able to dig up an old follow list to restore them is very handy indeed if you like to test out various clients. 10000 - This is your mute list. Similar to the follow list, these can get nuked pretty easily and for similar reasons. Additionally, some clients support private, encrypted mutes, while others don't. If you have muted someone privately on a client that supports them, and then mute someone else on a client that doesn't support private mutes, the private mutes are often lost. All of these are what are called "replaceable events." This means that relays are supposed to discard old versions of them once they have received a new version, that way you don't have more than one relay list, or more than one follow list, etc. If a client receives more than one version of a replaceable event, it will go with the most recent version. However, because Luminostr pulls from so many relays where old versions of these replaceable events might still be available, I can use it to see a history of edits made. This makes it very useful for diagnosing when a problem with one of these replaceable events occurred and how, and then give instruction on how to fix it. For instance, I can see that your oldest available relay list was created 6/13/2025 and had 12 relays listed on it, with all of them listed as both outbox and inbox. This tells me you were probably using a client that didn't allow you to select which relays were read and which were write, like Damus or Primal. Then you edited your relay list on 3/3/2026 to get to the state it was in when I made my previous recommendations. Since you already had a kind 10002, it is unlikely that a client would have automatically created a new one for you, let alone one with that particular setup. It's still somewhat possible, though, since your old relay list was only found on one relay, and if the client you were using on 3/3/2026 could not find that relay list, it may have generated a new one and requested a signature from whatever signer you were using, if you were using a signer at all. Finally, it looks like you updated your relay list today and you now have 3 outbox relays and 4 inbox relays. Looking much better. Moreover, it looks like you did so using the Ditto client. However, you have not yet updated your DM relay list.

You have me intrigued. What makes zapping a difficult task for you? Is there a convoluted process you have to go through to zap someone with your current setup? If you let me know what you are using for a lightning wallet, I may be able to help make that easier on you. Zapping and being zapped is one of the most unique aspects of Nostr, but if it is hard to do, that will have a chilling effect on participation.

I admit it was a piece of cake with ditto. I used muun. (Hoping that you did receive my zap). With other clients, I guess I don't use a NWC supporting wallet

Ah, yeah. Muun doesn't support NWC, which is the absolute easiest way to zap on Nostr in my experience. Muum is an odd wallet in other ways, too, which can come back to bite you on fees in a high on-chain fee environment. This is because Muum is actually an on-chain wallet masquerading as a Lightning wallet. When you pay via Lightning, Muun does a submarine swap automatically to exchange the on-chain funds over to Lightning before sending the payment. So you are having to pay on-chain fees with each payment sent. Adds up, for sure. I would recommend using a Lightning wallet specificly for zapping with Nostr, and one that supports NWC. Doesn't matter if it is custodial, as you should only keep a small amount in it anyway. Coinos or Minibits are both still decent options, I think. Zeus is also a really good option, but you'll need to use the ecash side of it at first, and that takes a little bit of setup. Looks like you are using your Strike Lightning address to receive zaps, and I don't think Strike supports NWC either. All three of the options I mentioned above will give you a Lightning address you can use for zapping.

I did receive it, and thank you!

Coinos did some upgrade sometime ago and I had to mail them to reactivate my account. All good of course but it was scary (with zero balance). I did try minibits, didn't like that I couldn't get my vanity userid for free. I understand that they need to make $$$ too so it's fine. What do you think of cashu.me? Looks like it gets the job done too

Yes, cashu.me should also work well. I haven't played with it much to know what its tradeoffs are. Everything has tradeoffs.

Not sure if you follow me so I'm posting it here to about strike. I switched to coinos who also supports NWC