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/


I’m sorry to hear that. It was a neat/ambitious idea.


Could a zap split or paid relay model be viable?


Now you have nostr. When every user can be a relay, isn't that what you are looking for?


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.


Just curious;

Why closing tor relays ?


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


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.


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.


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.


How about relay.tools? Or is this something different? I was not very familiar with relayable


Do you accept Monero? Monero people are much more likely to fund the infrastructure they use than Bitcoiners who like to hold their precious coins.


hey you are back!


Yes, was a bit of a hiatus.


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.


Good to see you active for the moment 🫂 I hope everything is okay with your family.


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 😂


Likewise! Thanks! Was mainly just stuff that took up what little "free time" I had. All good now!


How many users were on the relayable network when it was at $1500/mo?


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


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).


nice


Have you shared a breakdown of costs? I've been looking for information on the realities of running a relay.


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.


Did in the past. Posted in this thread the general setup.


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.


Just a heads up tried to zap you and got this
https://i.nostr.build/HtVMTatteIo3ob04.jpg


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 💜


We have downsized our relay network.
More information can be found on site.

Tor relays have also been discontinued.


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.


If they don't have funds how did they pay for the crickets?


So… question. I get that VPS can be expensive, but I am curious the reasons you decided not to self host?


Newbie question. Isn't Amethyst updated over F-droid?


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.


Thank you for your service


Sorry to hear, seemed like a good idea. Unfortunately, I didn't have much luck using the relay as they would rarely connect. Tried to donate multiple times but my node could not find a route to yours.


Sorry to hear about the financial struggles. I’d love to know more about the attacks you faced running the relays and also why you decided to drop tor support.


zaps are scarce

zaps are scarce


but isn't the idea to have many relays ran by different people? instead of one giant immense super scalable relay


With your tears. You will own nothing, eat crickets and be happy.