Hey! I believe nostrudel has a setting somewhere that you need to enable somewhere for it to automatically AUTH to a relay. I’m not exactly sure where though.
I had this problem too. It's on the left menu at the bottom, some sort of weird icon there. Can't remember what someone told me and I'm not computer atm:(
Cheers
yes, https://next.nostrudel.ninja has a setting to proactively auth, i forget which page of the settings, maybe privacy... also decrypting DMs automatically is a thing too, that's in performance