We've had a lot of talk about relays over the past day here on Nostr. This may be a bit confusing if you're new to Nostr.
What's going on with this discussion and why are many people making comments, jokes, or memes about relays?
The argument boils down to centralization and decentralization. On Nostr, we decentralize our infrastructure by using a potential wide variety of servers. Many of us are reading this note right now that's been retrieved from a variety of servers or as we call them, relays. Some relays are more popular than others. This leads to the questions surrounding decentralization. If many users are only using a top subset of relays, then we're not as decentralized as we could be or maybe even as decentralized as we should be.
I have various opinions on this subject. Even if Nostriches mostly only use ten relays, we're still magnitudes better than any existing social platform where only one entity runs the server infrastructure. We can do better though and we should do better. We have the tools to and the capabilities to make Nostr even more decentralized.
Now, this gets us into the next discussion. Which method of decentralization is best? For that, again, in my opinion, I'm a fan of the Gossip model. Simple put, Gossip makes relay selection not overly matter all that much. You can use any relay that you'd like and your follower's clients essentially fetch the notes and events from the relays that are being used without the need to be utilizing the same relay for communication to flow.
What should you do? Nothing, IMO. Relay selection and discovery aren't that great on most clients. I'd say keep using the same relays that you're using for now. Maybe, at some point, you'll update your relays to use smaller, community relays. For now, this is a developer problem to solve. You just keep creating notes and sending zaps. It will all work out in the end. Our developers LOVE to have problems to solve. Pura vida!
Derek Ross
npub18a…tp424
2024-03-21 14:55:10
Author Public Key
npub18ams6ewn5aj2n3wt2qawzglx9mr4nzksxhvrdc4gzrecw7n5tvjqctp424Published at
2024-03-21 14:55:10Event JSON
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"content": "We've had a lot of talk about relays over the past day here on Nostr. This may be a bit confusing if you're new to Nostr. \n\nWhat's going on with this discussion and why are many people making comments, jokes, or memes about relays?\n\nThe argument boils down to centralization and decentralization. On Nostr, we decentralize our infrastructure by using a potential wide variety of servers. Many of us are reading this note right now that's been retrieved from a variety of servers or as we call them, relays. Some relays are more popular than others. This leads to the questions surrounding decentralization. If many users are only using a top subset of relays, then we're not as decentralized as we could be or maybe even as decentralized as we should be.\n\nI have various opinions on this subject. Even if Nostriches mostly only use ten relays, we're still magnitudes better than any existing social platform where only one entity runs the server infrastructure. We can do better though and we should do better. We have the tools to and the capabilities to make Nostr even more decentralized. \n\nNow, this gets us into the next discussion. Which method of decentralization is best? For that, again, in my opinion, I'm a fan of the Gossip model. Simple put, Gossip makes relay selection not overly matter all that much. You can use any relay that you'd like and your follower's clients essentially fetch the notes and events from the relays that are being used without the need to be utilizing the same relay for communication to flow. \n\nWhat should you do? Nothing, IMO. Relay selection and discovery aren't that great on most clients. I'd say keep using the same relays that you're using for now. Maybe, at some point, you'll update your relays to use smaller, community relays. For now, this is a developer problem to solve. You just keep creating notes and sending zaps. It will all work out in the end. Our developers LOVE to have problems to solve. Pura vida!",
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