Nostr View

Silberengel @Silberengel - 1mo

Few know this. nostr:nevent1qvzqqqqqqypzplfq3m5v3u5r0q9f255fdeyz8nyac6lagssx8zy4wugxjs8ajf7pqqs8m9t44pya6ncqastd9m5jpxwvseackcjw8897rj26sg6asfh4pccxtr3mc

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Silberengel @Silberengel - 1mo

If they offered them "res publica" (to the larger public), then those would indeed be public relays. Those would probably be the most-restrictive relays, tho, not the least-restrictive ones.

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Silberengel @Silberengel - 1mo

Getting away from public relays was the entire point of building Nostr. 🤷‍♀️ Public relays _have_ to censor, as the people running them answer to the larger public and can't host anything the majority of the sovereign would find overly offensive. The goal of Nostr is actually to have lots of different, easily-created and easily-maintained PRIVATE relays, where the person running it just answers to himself and any customers he might have, rather than needing to achieve some wider consensus.

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Silberengel @Silberengel - 1mo

There is no way to definitively tell who owns a relay. They don't even have an associated npub; they're just websocket addresses, to the users. The ones with whitelists and AUTH (community and/or paid) are self-explanatory. The "public" ones also have restrictions, but they tend to obfuscate them. And they are prone to rate-limiting and throttling of particular npubs, rather than allowing/disallowing them outright.

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Silberengel @Silberengel - 1mo

Anyone can setup a relay, including governments. I'm running or managing like 6 of them, now, and I spin some temporary ones up, for testing, using NAK. I have two that only run on localhost. They're just servers running over websockets, like half of the Internet. It's the communication protocol they use, that's novel, not the idea of sending json events from one machine to another. We were doing that, on an industrial scale, five years ago.

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Silberengel @Silberengel - 1mo

Yeah, can even do it with curl, now.

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Silberengel @Silberengel - 1mo

Well, doesn't Ditto do that, with Postgres?

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Silberengel @Silberengel - 1mo

Well, it's a particular use case. #Alexandria will probably also have a database, for some premium services (self-hosted or rented), but I don't want someone needing a database to use the basic app functionality. That's sort of overengineering it. Running a database uses more resources and is more complex than just running a relay with a stringent whitelist, or rolling events off according to a deletion-schedule, or something. Npubs could simply download events to cache or have a SQlite or whatnot DB, or a relay on localhost.

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Silberengel @Silberengel - 1mo

I guess running a relay is a bit like running a Lightning node. Most people won't do it, but enough will, that everyone can use theirs and pay them (with love or money 😅 ). A database is more like transacting on-chain. It's more persistent and secure, and allows for more complex data analysis, but costs more and is a higher hurdle because you're writing to/from the core data storage system. I expect that there will be more LN nodes than Bitcoin nodes and more relays than Nostr-DBs, but I see viable uses cases for both.

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Silberengel @Silberengel - 1mo

I found that out, yesterday, looking for ways to ping the relays. I think it's pretty new.

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Silberengel @Silberengel - 1mo

I can see DBs for aggregators, for instance, so that you can version events without having to keep all revisions live, and do complex queries/computation on other hardware, and just serve up the results as vector embeddings. Also allows you to store events off-relay and then pass them to the relay when only certain npubs send a request. Tighter access-control and a protective layer against hacking. You could also move the data one layer back and have multiple relays pulling from one source, and control what they are each allowed to pull and for whom. Then a relay is like a query server that only runs a subset of queries, which allows for query optimization. It could get pretty wild 🤯 .

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Silberengel @Silberengel - 1mo

The difference being that the database is usually _in addition_ to a relay. It's like a relay backend. A backend to a backend, basically. And it's another thing that could break. Adds complexity and maintenance costs, not necessarily storage costs. Also raises the cost of onboarding new maintainers, as it's one more thing they have to learn. I do a lot of pipelining and chaining, and each little thing included drives up the chance of the whole thing breaking.

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Silberengel @Silberengel - 1mo

Well, yeah, but most Nostr stuff isn't serious. The Serious People have all at least looked into adding databases. Scriptkiddies aren't going to bother worrying about query optimization, complex filters, persistent versioning, and etc. They're just like: 1) Use AI and NDK to make a buggy javascript client 2) Post note to internet over domain only paid through for 3 months 3)

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Silberengel @Silberengel - 1mo

went with "webtalk"

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Silberengel @Silberengel - 1mo

Yeah, but that's why database integration and migration is a nightmare. Using a communications protocol to structure the core intra-db communication, so, that it can transit over common relays, is next-gen document db. Especially, as the protocol increasingly branches into subdomains, with their own specialty events. Turns the Internet into a real Internet of Databases, rather than mere web pages.

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Silberengel @Silberengel - 1mo

So few have done it because most of the devs aren't DBMs. 😅 It's only really getting traction, now, because the relay devs and data analysts have started working on it, and their npubs are finally large enough for everyone interested to see what they're saying. Team Backend has entered the chat.

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Silberengel @Silberengel - 1mo

Every event you save to your computer is durable, for as long as you store it. Same as every event saved to anyone else's computer, including the one hosting the njump relay. The best thing, is to have a local relay or database, hooked up to your client, and save a copy of everything you find interesting. Then you can always find the original, signed note, even if the internet link is eventually broken.

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