If NOSTR is the Bitcoin of Speech Protocols...
Does Running a Node = Running a Relay?
Are we LARPing if we don't run our own Relays? Why/Why not
Been stewing on this for a while.
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Replies (24)
Triggered.
if you are running citrine local relay on your phone, you can use tor orbot to turn it into an onion service and then use that relay for broadcasting notes from your outbox (i think that's how it works anyways), which is pretty badbass.
Easily spin your own personal relay and blossom media server with relay.peonylanewine.com and blossom. peonylanewine.com @eggstr
Nope, it's super simple.
I run a personal relay/blossom server. It's super simple to do. Took me maybe 10 minutes to get running, most of that waiting was buying the domain and setting up the VPS.
I don't think it's an apples to apples comparison.
The privacy expectations are super different and the importance of verifying your identity is different as well.
I think the main reason to run your own relay would be to ensure you don't lose things you posted. It would be nice if I could also back up posts exclusively from the people I follow, but I don't care enough to look into it yet.
send it
get em
okay but are we LARPing
and by we I mean probably not you
I mean me
yes. if we dont run our own relays a few things will (already have) happen.
1) clients throw away that entire relay configuration page because "muh users cant understand", and just use one big relay.
2) outbox never happens, so running your own relay is useless.
3) we all end up on primal, and other clients cant even see the notes because the 'relay' does not serve other nostr clients the notes.
4) primal is forced to censor.
5) no apps or relays are left and primal corp is exactly like twitter but with kyc zaps and advertising and secret trending algos.
Eh... You? Probably not.
I mostly building for Community admin to run their own relay, media server, mint, ...
Individual users: the incentives rarely line up. I see a lot of #complainstr ahead if we hope for that and especially if we hope for the Twitter copy-cats to tailor their UX to that.
Primal has NWC.
I tried looking into outbox but didn’t find any good documentation
As a nostr noob I have huge problems with customized relay setup. There does not seem to be any comprehensive guide. I am dependend on nerds dropping hints in notes and comments.
It's not a larp. If nostr required everyone to run a relay it would never work.
My zap’s worth:
Running a node is easy. Holding your own Bitcoin keys is the critical part.
Running a Nostr relay is worthless the easy way, and I haven’t bothered with an effective way that’s harder. Yet, I hold my own social keys and use Nostr on the backs of others. This is fine until my speech is infringed. Then the hard way is available to me if projection of my voice is important enough.
same can probably be said for Bitcoin? it's just the fact that you easily can that matters?
Yes can be said of bitcoin too. I'm certain 99% of people don't run nodes they just use trezor or whatever.
What matters is that *enough* people do for it to be credibly decentralized
Needs to be worthwhile for devs
to build user friendly relay management to easily configure support for desired NIPs and set behaviors as desired for storage and traffic. This is what will allow individuals and non-projects to run relays effectively. I have a Start9 sitting there doing shit for me on Nostr because the software is bare bones, and the clients I use don’t support .onion nostr traffic. Those two incompatibilities are prohibitive. Puts me in the Primal garden.
How do you do that currently?
We run a crowdfund annually to pay for the VPS. The LND node, BTCPay server as well as backups run on premise with zfs, tunneled through to the VPS.
On the VPS we run each service as a systemd service. I'm considering using Nix to declare everything so that it's reproducible but it will probably take some time before I get around to it.
Here are some of the services we are running:
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Right now there's not much in the way of admin UI other than a tool to publish calendar events for our meetups, but I think @verbiricha mentioned creating a nostr CMS for community admins