I’m writing my own Nostr client. (Not entirely from scratch. There seem to be pretty nice libraries out there in TS and Rust!)

But I found 2 annoying characteristics of the relay protocol:

The “notice” message isn’t tied to any particular request or subscription.  But some relays use it as a way to give error messages.

Ex: I found one relay would answer my search subscription with a notice “error: slow down”. Then it never resolves the original request. (Despite IIRC the NIP saying that you should always close a subscription.)

So now I need to add special cases to handle that relay/message. And probably a timeout for subscriptions. Which you can’t do in the general case. But I guess if you don’t get an event or an EOSE within some time you can assume the subscription failed to start?

But how do I know when I’ve “slowed down” enough? Why wouldn’t the relay just throttle its responses to me if it wants me to go slower? 😣

OTOH I guess you have to do this kind of defensive programming for any protocol. But would be nice if there were a standard way to handle cases like this. 




#nostrdev