Oddbean

It's a long and complicated process. First, I enter all of the relays onto a spreadsheet. Then, I go into my kitchen cabinet and find the box of angel hair spaghetti. I then choose a single strand of spaghetti for each relay that I have entered on my spreadsheet. Next, I break each piece of spaghetti into a specific length, making sure that no piece is within 1 inch of another one. The next part is crucial to this process. I ask my wife to boil a pot of water for me. While, that's boiling, I take careful measurements and assign each piece of spaghetti a relay ID on my spreadsheet. Once the water is boiling, I instruct my wife to cook the spaghetti and to let me know when it's done. When the spaghetti is cooked, I carefully remove each piece as to not break, rip, or stretch the individual strands. Next, I throw those fuckers at the wall. Whichever ones stick, I pull off of the wall and measure their length. I then compare the lengths to the spreadsheet and find the approximate corresponding value. The relays that have corresponding spaghetti that sticks are then saved onto my Nostr profile.

Nearly a year later, my process for choosing a relay is still essentially the same. nostr:nevent1qqsgnm06cqmgzfq9cp3pda99k2lc7pj28v2q4d555lf3dukmxlcxlqqpzpmhxue69uhkummnw3ezuamfdejsygplwuxkt5a8vj5utj6s8tsj8e3wcavc45p4mqmw92qs7wrh5azmyspsgqqqqqqs6dgh8u

I have 10 relays configured. 6 of them reject my posts. No reason is given. I can speculate that maybe they want a few sats per post - but for that to work, the client needs to see it as a feature, not 6 broken relays. While we're on the subject of pay per post, what if DM implementations have an optional feature where non whiltelisted npubs have to pay a few sats to send you a DM. This would nip the spam problem email has in the bud. Notice that spam is not (as much of) an issue with paper mail because the sender has to pay a few cents per mailing. There were attempts to add it to email, but the inevitable result was no email except from whitelisted contacts (no special service needed for that). People already take it as a given that sending emails is "free".

With the outbox model, we finally have an alternative to my spaghetti model. nostr:nevent1qqsgnm06cqmgzfq9cp3pda99k2lc7pj28v2q4d555lf3dukmxlcxlqqpz9mhxue69uhkummnw3ezuamfdejj7q3q8ams6ewn5aj2n3wt2qawzglx9mr4nzksxhvrdc4gzrecw7n5tvjqxpqqqqqqzvv9059