This short blog post aims to provide a step-by-step guide on connecting to the best performing relays and finding the balance between maximum connectivity and minimum load on your device
While every new Nostr user is encouraged to study the plethora of Nostr materials explaining the whole range of Nostr components, sometimes one simply looks for a quick and easy guide on how to improve connectivity and/or mobile device battery life. This is exactly what this guide is about.
I won’t talk about free relays, assuming that the client you are using is already connected to a number of those. Let’s jump directly to the paid relays – end of the day they are incentivised to deliver the best user experience in an obvious way – you pay their maintainers to do so.
Nostr.wine
The number one relay on my list is https://nostr.wine Nostr wine is a paid relay that lets you broadcast your notes to all the relay subscribers (readers). Connecting to the relay requires a one time 18,888 sat fee submission.
In addition to the general relay service Nostr Wine 🍷 offers a filter relay – https://nostr-wine.github.io/filter-relay/. For 10,000 sats/month (with significant discounts for longer subscription periods) you get access to reading from and writing to a bunch of relays.
This dramatically improves your connectivity while requiring to only connect to one relay, extending your device’s battery life and reducing overall load.
To connect to this relay follow these steps:
Enter your npub in the corresponding field
Pay the lightning invoice
Add wss://nostr.wine to the relays list in your Nostr client
New users who sign up to nostr.wine get 1 month of access to the filter relay. After that a 10,000 sat/month or up to 120k sats for 24 months must be paid as a subscription fee (believe me it’s worth it). After paying the invoice simply add wss://filter.nostr.wine/REPLACE_WITH_YOUR_NPUB?broadcast=true to your relays. Done!
All additional regularly updated information on the filter relay, including the relays it reads from (and filters) & broadcasts to is available at https://nostr-wine.github.io/filter-relay/.
Nostrich.land
A good alternative, or better yet, an addition to nostr.wine is https://nostrich.land/. It will also be more appealing for the HODL freaks as it only requires a one time payment of 15k sats. Nostrich Land offers a similar experience, providing a duo of wss://relay.nostrich.land broadcasting relay and a wss://universe.nostrich.land reading and filtering relay. The onboarding process is identical to the Nostr Wine, however Universe Nostrich Land does not require monthly payments (at least at the moment).
Nostr.band
Another worthy addition to your setup is a free (for now) wss://relay.nostr.band relay. It reads from all known relays and filters notes to free your global feed from spam. You can see the details here .
Nostr.mutinywallet
This broadcasting relay will make sure you get heard: just add wss://nostr.mutinywallet.com to the list relays in your Nostr client and it will broadcast your notes to all active relays available on https://nostr.watch/.
Is that all?
These four options should do pretty good, but you are obviously free to connect to more free and/or paid relays (regularly updated list is available at https://relay.exchange/). Over time, as Nostr evolves, the approach to handling relays as well as monetization strategies will transform, however being in the know of how this works (more or less) under the hood will definitely remain a useful skill. Hope this post was valuable for you. If so, support my work.
See you on the other side of the rabbit hole.
Tony
I am a self governed Bitcoin educator, working on spreading the good word about open & permissionless protocols among the citizens of post USSR countries. My projects include:
Bitcoin-only educational resource (RU) https://21ideas.org/
Nostr documentation website (RU) https://nostr.21ideas.org/
Important Bitcoin events and quotes database and Nostr bot https://bitcal.21ideas.org/