Oddbean new post about login | logout We have downsized our relay network. More information can be found on site. Tor relays have also been discontinued.
Sad :( Relayable.org has been downsized from its network of worldwide relays to just one in Los Angeles. This is due to a lack of financial support and large monthly hosting bills. We tried numerous times to get funding from the usual suspects but were not even sent back a denial email. So due to the ongoing costs and slowing of direct support with the price of BTC going up, the hard choice was made to downsize. Thanks to everyone who has supported and helped over the last 2 years! - Jascha https://relayable.org/
As expected 🙂 My adre.su won't grow either due to the lack of financial support from users. It's not that there isn't any support at all, but the donations barely cover the VPS costs. Expanding the network, setting up a media storage, or a DNS server is out of the question 😁 This was predictable, and there are no complaints. Free relays are, in essence, a form of charity.
The neglect of the nostr relay network, has been quite remarkable. Everything else was supported, but the relay network was thrown under the bus often is a quite unkind way. It is a shame because without the relay network, there would be no nostr. Ultimately I think it's a case of "tragedy of the commons". It's never too late to help the relay network. But 80% have left and most wont come back. Let's try and do better with #ditto !
How will ditto change any of this? It will still be the same
I think of #ditto as nostr 2.0, has all the strengths, and much more, great UX, network effect, scalability, interopability, standards compliance, professional etc. Doesnt have to be ditto itself, just copy the design patterns.
The ones who cause me the most trouble are Nostr clients developers 🤣
Which clients?
Of course, Amethyst, but the others aren’t much better. They couldn’t care less about small relays and their administrators.
What do you mean? We have supported lots of small relays. In fact, I am talking to small operators almost every day to help them out.
It's hard for me to recall specific examples from the past year, except for the fact that Amethyst always consumed more traffic, sent unnecessary events, and established unnecessary connections. Literally every update of Amethyst now feels like a slap in the face to the relay. I don't expect anything good anymore 😂
Amethyst does a lot. And it will always use a lot of data and connections. And we will push for using more for sure. That doesn't mean it is "unnecessary". That is exactly what our users want. We want to do it all, and if we do, we are loading ALL of it, all the time. As a relay, you have the option to block what requests you serve and which events you store. With the outbox model that we now implement, we only hit relays that might have the info. And that's how small relays win. We are the largest userbase app that is at this level. In fact, we are even pushing for dynamic limits which allow relays to have more power to limit the client on demand. https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/pull/1434
Just a heads up tried to zap you and got this https://i.nostr.build/HtVMTatteIo3ob04.jpg
So… question. I get that VPS can be expensive, but I am curious the reasons you decided not to self host?
In my case it will be even more expensive and less stable, although of course if I had the money there would be such an option as well. The plan was to cover all the major regions of Russia, and of course, in some of them, I would have to maintain my own servers.
I’m sorry to hear that. It was a neat/ambitious idea.
I always went into the project with a disdain for paid models. For a while it was break even but with BTC going up the donations went down. If figured out a funding method could easily scale the network back up. I plan to share the Terraform/Ansible and design for anyone wanting to replicate too.
Could a zap split or paid relay model be viable?
Just curious; Why closing tor relays ?
Was costing out of pocket around $1500US a month. Plus relayable was a target of a lot of Chinese and other DDoS attacks. So in addition to cost was time costs juggling it all. I had some family stuff took more of my time as well.
hey you are back!
Have you shared a breakdown of costs? I've been looking for information on the realities of running a relay.
Did in the past. Posted in this thread the general setup.
Hope the family is all good. If you haven't yet, try applying for nostr:nprofile1qqs8suecw4luyht9ekff89x4uacneapk8r5dyk0gmn6uwwurf6u9ruspzpmhxue69uhkumewwd68ytnrwghszxthwden5te0wfjkccte9eekummjwsh8xmmrd9skctcpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhs2juazd an grant. Maybe they could help.
Thanks! Tried that route got crickets.
Damn. Maybe they just don't have funds. Not sure why you wouldn't at least get a reply back. Thank you though for your relay service 💜
If they don't have funds how did they pay for the crickets?
With your tears. You will own nothing, eat crickets and be happy.
How many users were on the relayable network when it was at $1500/mo?
Wasn't so much users are traffic. We had Los Angeles, Montreal, Helsinki, Sydney, Buenos Aires, and Montreal data centers with GeoDNS routing. Each relay synced with the others to have consistent data. While also syncing with about 10 of the other top relays to replicate their data. The current LMDB for strfry is 152GB (will be backing up and pruning soon). Was planning to have a separate "archive" relay for historical data (now on-hold).
feels like very very premature scalability
Was always a PoC and consist performance example. Most relays are single-point failure be it one server or all on Cloudflare (for example). One year ago was handling a lot of all nostr traffic one way or another.
