Oddbean

@asknostr I'm trying to figure out the whole relay thing. I send a note 3 times using @primal desktop, every time connecting to different relays. Good to know: I am a new user with 6 followers (including myself) and 192 following. This will give me probably a low WoT score, but it will be the case for many new people who come into nostr. To check which relays accepted my notes, I used @Coracle (shout out to @hodlbod for his amazing work) TRIAL 1 - standard primal relays 3 relays accepted my note: - nostr.oxtr.dev - relay.damus.io - relay.nostr.band The strange thing is that only relay.damus.io was in my relay list, the others were not. Not sure where they came from, unless there is a delay in (dis)connecting to relays? I also was very surprised that relay.primal.net did not accept my note TRIAL 2 - relays that are advised online (google search) I connected to 13 relays in total, including nos.lol and relay.snort.social 3 relays accepted my note: - nostr.oxtr.dev - relay.mostr.pub - relay.damus.io So, all these 3 relays were in the list of 13, so basically my note got rejected by 10 TRIAL 3 - the WoT relays that are advised because of spam. I was curious to see what would happen for a new user like me I connected to 15 WoT relays. The only 2 relays that accepted my note: - nostr.oxtr.dev/ - relay.damus.io/ Both those 2 relays were not in my relay list QUESTIONS 1) Is there indeed a delay between connecting to relays and the actual usage of relays to accept your notes? This could explain some of the relays accepting my notes while they are not in my relay list 2) Is there a way for new users to get some engagement on their notes? With a low WoT score, I think their notes are rejected by many relays. Even if they are connected to 10+ relays, it is likely that their notes are only accepted by one or two relays. What are the best 5 relays to be connected to as a new user? 3) Is there a reason that I cannot see my own posts in my primal (desktop) feed? A few days ago, I could see my own posts in my feed, but that seems to have disappeared. I assumed this had to do with relays, and this started my initial investigation. 4) What can be the reason that in primal I see 5 reactions on my earlier post, but in Coracle I see an extra reply by someone? Can this be relay - related? A long rambling, I know, but I try to figure out how all these parts work together. Because I want to build on Nostr, without users having to understand anything about the underlying plumbing. For that to succeed, I will need to understand it myself 😉 ) Mental note: get my wallet filled up, so I can start zapping the helpful community.

Great questions, relays can get complicated, especially since relay policy isn't surfaced super well. To get some hints on what a particular relay may or may not accept, you can look at the NIP 11 relay document and watch for error messages contained in NOTICE or OK messages. This may help explain why your notes are being rejected. It's odd that primal would reject notes from their own users. For most of the rejections, I doubt that WoT would be the reason, since wot filtering is a relatively new thing on the relay side and not supported by a lot of relay implementations. My best guess would be rate limiting, or over-zealous spam filtering after the last few weeks of ReplyGuy.

@hodlbod is right. And on reading this seems way too complex for a newcomer to nostr. Ideally, there is an auto-pilot https://github.com/damus-io/damus/issues/423 that just works™️ where there is an option to take more ownership of relay management. Wd yall think @Vitor Pamplona @Linda @hzrd149

How are you checking if relays accepted your notes? The only reliable way is to query the relays directly, one by one. If you are using some site or app to check for you, this site might not have a direct connection to the relays you posted to.

Lots to digest here but I’ll do the best I can without writing too much. First, and most importantly, primal is not a normal nostr client that sources events exclusively from relays. They have their own caching relay that is not comparable with the protocol and they rely on it heavily for loading notes within the app. The network was recently under a spam attack that caused lots of problems for their cache. That could explain harsher rejection criteria for their relay or some of the missing content issues you’re describing. - relay.nostr.band is an aggregator that reads from other relays so even if you do not write directly to that relay it will likely have your events eventually. - relay.snort.social is a paid subscription relay, you have to pay to write - nos.lol has some of your latest posts. Not sure when they appeared though. I’m not sure about the other relays you tried. I think primal sets a random list of 10 which is a very poor way of doing relays selection. Lots of relays are slow, frequently offline, or outright broken. I would encourage you to try another client first to see if that improves your experience. In addition you could consider adding a paid relay to improve your reach and loading speed. @katie and I run a paid relay called nostr.wine so I am biased but don’t take my word for it - ask or look around for recommendations. Welcome to #nostr I hope it get easier from here!

Thanks for taking the time to shine some light on this @Mazin I'm still trying to take it all in. There is indeed a big difference in experience between for example @primal and @Coracle. The thing is that you don't know what you don't know. So all felt normal at Primal for a while, but looking at my profile in Coracle, I see different messages, replies, etc. It's a new brave world for me to get into. One step at the time. But tips like yours definitely help!

There should be no delays in accepting notes, but in the last days we got several spam attacks and many relay tried to filter them, so this may have generated some rejections. I suggest you to use a client that fully support the Outbox model, pick up a couple of public relays and a paid one with a good spam protection, to try to be visible to those using WoT relays. Next step: run your own relay. If can be useful: nostr:nevent1qqsqqqq32xv7lhdrt2fdsp9za5un2wacaz735zqu0zrdlzeyn0mtk3qpr3mhxue69uhkxmm4de68y6t9wvhxv6tpw34xze3wvdhk6tczypaaaaa7ytwcuk05vq8qgj498gw0jadfm37j0h6cxw780kmcffvq2qcyqqqqqqgva957d

I'm not quite there to run my own relay (but would love to in the future). Bookmarked your relay setup remark for future reference. Currently, I try to figure out how Nostr works through the eyes of a 'normal user'. And then peek behind the curtains as a new dev, just to gain some more understanding. I now added to my list to look into the outbox model that you mention, and see what it entails. It's an exciting learning journey. I'm just not ready yet to onboard my friends and family, while I still struggle to get a hold of the how and what myself ;)