352 sats \ 0 replies \ @0xtr 19 Jan \ on: Paid and self-hosted nostr relays nostr
I will always recommend setting up your own relay, just because that gives you ownership of your social data just like running a bitcoin node gives you the ability to transact bitcoin whenever you want.
I would also recommend to pay for a couple of relays. Not because they're neccessarily better than a free relay but because paid relays has a higher chance of being sustainable than a free relay (without funding). Ironically, I've been running a free relay since mid-april 2022.
Some paid relays also offer extra stuff such as client-specific paid features (e.g. on https://snort.social), LN addresses, NIP-05 hosted verification, email services, backup services, better spam filtering, etc, so you should see if some offer something better than the other.
I'd also add a couple of free relays. If they cause a lot of spam in your feed (they don't for me), maybe change to a different relay.
If you're going to selfhost a relay, there are many ways to do that depending on your skill level. If you have an umbrel at home, you can set up a relay there. If you have an instance of lnbits running somewhere, you could install a relay there.
If you want to set stuff up yourself, I'd recommend strfry or nostr-rs-relay. Both has some documentation on how to get it set up but you need to know your way around a terminal and web server setup. Another popular relay software is nostream.
And if you selfhost a relay, you'd probably want to limit who can write to it to either just you or a close set of friends or anons you trust to ensure that it's not filled with spam by bad actors. All the relay softwares I listed above has some functionality for filtering events, usually through a separate plugin.
How much time does it take to run a relay? Once it's set up, the maintenance part is just to keep software up to date (which honestly doesn't need to be that often), at least if the relay is just for you or a small group of npubs. If you open the relay to the rest of the world, there might be a bit more maintenance w.r.t fighting spam, ensuring proper performance, disk space, etc.
TL;DR: Run your own relay if you can. If not, find some relays you trust to keep your data and do occational backups of your notes in case all your relays go down.
I'm working on improvements to my Strfry writepolicy plugin called "Chief". It has three filters that lets you whitelist/blacklist public keys, kinds and content.
This week I've refactored a good portion of the code to let you choose between a JSON file and a postgresql database for storing the stuff you want to whitelist/blacklist. I've also added suppport for individually activating/deactivating each filter type (public key, kind, content).
Next, I want to add support for statistics to get a better overview of how busy the relay really is. If anyone has any good tips for this I'd appreciate it!
Link to the repo: https://github.com/0xtrr/chief
Accept BTC only with BTCPayServer and give your customers a guide on how to acquire some sats if they don't have any (I'd expect anyone that wants to buy a miner to know how to acquire sats though)
I should probably have checked more clients, lol. Seems to work fine on Snort as you said so probably a nostrudel bug then.
@k00b can we get proper "previews" for refferal links too? Pasted the referral URL on noStrudel and the link wouldn't preview until I removed the referral part of the url.
The EU is a shithole but nobody seems to care. Everyone just seem like they think everything is fine.
Don't have any new year resolutions this year, just going to continue improving my health and technical skills. NYR usually lasts until end of January for me so I've learned to just start to take action right away instead of waiting for a new year.
Well, it's not as simple that imo. Developers can work on a project for months, write a lot of tests to verify expected behaviour and there can still be unintended bugs the developer didn't catch. Even with multiple people vetting the code, sometimes all of them overlook a weird edge case that nobody thought about which can be misused by an attacker. I've worked for a couple of big worldwide companies as a developer and I've seen this many times over the years. There is always some trust involved when you run code, either you have to trust your own code or someone elses.
I hope you get the help you need to get the bitcoins back though, it's fantastic to have people like you in the community that wants to host services and help others out in some kind of way. 4 BTC is a lot but I hope you keep that community-spirit up after this too.
Ooof sorry for your loss sir. Software is not perfect and it will probably never be unfortunately. This is why it's important to have multiple people vet code that exposes money to the internet.