There are a few notes I made when I first got on nostr that I can't find anymore. Probably the relays I was using then have all gone away, or they had some kind of problem that led to data loss, or they simply just don't want to keep old notes.
Along comes this thing called BigBrotr. It's like a black box recorder for the entire nostr network, recording everything it can find from everywhere. This doesn't really solve my problem of missing notes, but it is something that relay operators might consider running.
Core Features
- 🗂 Full Event Archive: Chronologically stores all events from every reachable relay.
- 🌍 Relay Mapping: Detects and indexes new relays using historical snapshots and live discovery (e.g. Nostr.Watch).
- 🛰 Live Monitoring: Measures relay health and connectivity daily (RTT, availability, NIP-11 support).
- 🔍 Redundancy Tracking: Tracks which relays host each event, revealing true network distribution.
- 🧅 Tor-Enabled: Built-in Tor support for full .onion relay access.
- 🧠 Graph Analysis Ready: Ideal for social graph and protocol research, spam detection, and more.
- 🧾 DVM Integration Ready: Easily integrates with Nostr-native Data Vending Machines to provide custom data services and insights.
On their roadmap for the future, I noticed this cool little item:
- 🌐 Launch a public explorer to browse relay statuses and archived events effortlessly
I would love to see an expanding list of places to search for archived events. BigBrotr also received a grant in Open Sats most recent round of nostr grants (#1275313) and it sounds like they will "deploy Bigbrotr on self-hosted hardware, optimize synchronization and monitoring, and release Lilbrotr, a lightweight version for indexing on low-resource devices."