Oddbean

#asknostr If you are using smaller relays, we’d love to know: - how did you discover them? - are they with people you know IRL, topical, local or something else - what do you like about using a smaller relay? - what if anything would you change or improve about using a smaller relay?

I'm using a small personal relay, wss://chorus.mikedilger.com:444/ - how did you discover them? I created it. I wrote the software. - are they with people you know IRL? Yes I know myself well enough at least. - what do you like about using a smaller relay? Total control, helps me debug my client - what if anything would you change or improve? I'm not sure right now it's pretty stable, but as soon as I think of it I will improve it.

I wrote the chorus relay https://github.com/mikedilger/chorus which uses techniques similar to strfry to offer crazy performance, but with some extra techniques Doug didn't use to make the performance even crazier fast. But I don't actually know if it is actually faster than strfry since nobody has run performance testing to find out (you know what they say about best laid plans and also about dry-labbing... I can't claim anything since I don't actually know). But chorus can be configured as a personal relay (doesn't allow events that come in to be immediately read back by others, so it can't be responsible for spam or illegal content, making your life easier) or a regular relay. I use mine as a personal relay and moderate content (so it can be read back out) and use it as both an INBOX and an OUTBOX (and DMs now too). Yes, gossip is my main project, a desktop client. Chorus helps me to improve gossip since I can clearly see and take to heart what is happening on both sides of a nostr connection.

I have two wss://theforest.nostr1.com and wss://the citadel.nostr1.com 1) I rent them from @cloud fodder He asked me to test out his new relay hosting service for free and then I liked it so much that I started paying and added a second one. 2) theforest is just my follow list and #dev type of hashtags (so, a combination of frens and topic). thecitadel is an OtherStuff relay for wiki pages and repo events or similar. 3) I like having a little private club with my frens and having some "home" people can always find me in, since I don't always write directly to the big relays. And I like that I can keep anything negative or low-signal off of there and just read from it, instead of needing a long personal mute-list. 4) I'd like a bit more complexity in the whitelisting/blacklisting/AUTH options, or add an API so that I can use it more as a "layer 2" relay (filter relay). Like being able to have someone whitelisted on the relay, but not allowed into a private community hosted on the relay. Or being able to say, show me all of the events with the client hint "Wikifreedia" or show me Kind 01 notes with the "k" tag for kind 1234. That way, I could use one relay as a basis for lots of "niche" clients, instead of having all of the filter logic a level up, in the client themselves, as that eats into bandwidth and slows my hardware down and means I see lots of crap I didn't even want and have to mute it all away, or whatnot.