Over at damus hq we are working on a privacy preserving push notification relay. This relay will always be on when you have push notifications enabled, but will not store anything. This will allow you to connect to private relay sets and still receive push notifications, and will work for DMs that require AUTH. Otherwise, writing to the damus relay will have the same effect as the notification relay for public situations, but if you don’t have the damus relay in your relay list notifications should still work. It’s a bit more tricky for non ios clients using the same private relay sets, we could use #nip65 to help them know to write to our notification relay, or maybe you could explicitly add the notification relay if you want your ios friends to receive notifications. Having a relay that you can trust not to store anything is key for this to work in a wide variety of situations. iOS push notifications are an inherently centralized thing, and getting it to work in a decentralized protocol is tricky, but we think this is an interesting approach to try vs the pull model used by nos.

Replies (24)

my rss app checks for updates in the background and i get notifications from that. couldn't damus also do this? if it doesn't destroy the battery, this seems like a good compromise - no instant notifications, but great privacy with little lift required by damus team
Colocar os servers atuais para rodarem mensagens privadas como encriptadas para não precisarem se preocupar com servers específicos
I’ll eventually start promoting Inbox! Got overwhelmed with other things. We are going to roll out AUTH for DMs this week on nostr.wine too.
We coded two variations of this: (i) uses Google's delivery but we encrypt the msg so that Google doesn't know anything about the package and (ii) an UnifiedPush API where users can put their own Notification servers up. Google's system definitely uses less battery, but UnifiedPush is more decentralizing since there is no need to provide any central push service/relay. We also tested leaving one websocket connection active at all times, but that connection alone was consuming ~5% of battery by the end of the day 🫤
I think it worked once when I updated to the version that had nfty support initially. hasn't worked since. just tried uninstalling and reinstalling the app as well.
Shawn's avatar
Shawn 2 years ago
What’s your daily active user count on that relay?
I guess I should probably be a good citizen and open an issue. i'll work on that today. excuse my previous bitching.