relay.tools quarterly report

July, 2024

Project updates

The major focus this quarter was building a NIP-42 AUTH proxy for strfry relays. Codename: interceptor.

NIP-42 AUTH proxy for strfry

I see this as a major innovation in nostr relaying and there was no other open source option in the ecosystem so I decided it was extremely important to investigate and get done. I was not completely sure that it would work, but after much building and testing I now think this is production ready.

Currently very few relays support NIP-42 AUTH. The ones that do, keep their software closed source as a value-add. This validates that it is a wanted, and valued feature.

I went live with an initial relay for testing wss://auth.nostr1.com. I coordinated the launch of this along with Amethyst re-doing their relay settings to have options for “Private Inbox Relays”. I also tested all major clients repeatedly and found and fixed bugs both client side and relay side.

I asked nostr for members to join this relay and help test, which they did and after multiple rounds of testing I believe the AUTH proxy is now ready for a major release.

This will continue to be a focus for next quarter.

https://github.com/relaytools/interceptor-proxy https://github.com/relaytools/interceptor

NIP-17 testing and collaboration

NIP-17 private DM features had a big push from clients this quarter so I helped them by coordinating multiple rounds of inter-client testing and using the new auth.nostr1.com relay. Clients included: coracle, amethyst, 0xChat and gossip.

These features are working well, although some of the issues filed and am tracking are still underway being fixed. Some are UX experience and some are simply interoperability issues or bugs that need more work. Specifically for 0xChat and Coracle. Gossip and Amethyst are fully functioning with no known bugs.

https://github.com/0xchat-app/0xchat-core/issues/12 https://github.com/coracle-social/coracle/issues/378

UI/UX improvements + NDK

Spent some time improving the UI/UX and this is still in-progress.

The main page has been updated to be more of an exact match from nostr designer @daniele

I also created a new relay explorer using NDK and worked with upstream to fix bugs related to NIP-42 AUTH in the library. My PRs are still outstanding but I am hopeful this will pave the way for NDK supporting NIP-42 auth in any clients that use it. I am also writing docs for NDK since this was un-charted territory and required a lot of digging through the code to figure out how to fix and use these features.

https://github.com/nostr-dev-kit/ndk/issues/246 https://github.com/nostr-dev-kit/ndk/pull/251 https://github.com/nostr-dev-kit/ndk/pull/248

I also started work on a complete re-write of the relay settings page. The settings page has too many options and is confusing to users so I am combining all the options into a ‘setup wizard’ that walks the user through the various types of relays and helps them pick options that they will want.

Relay Metadata, Monitoring and Discovery

One part of the vision for relay.tools has been to make it easier to discover new relays. Not only for relays running on the platform but for ALL relays. Therefor I spent some time this quarter working toward that goal.

I discovered that @sandwich has been working a long time on NIP-66 and it is exactly what we need for relay discovery. It has many additional features as well such as monitoring, and geographic filtering.

https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/pull/230

I will be adding support for this into relay.tools on the main directory listing, so I currently am working with him to finalize the NIP and get it merged. It will be able to poll these events and show/search through relays that are discovered on the wider nostr network.

I also created a new tool to publish these events so that I can start down this path. The tool is called monitorlizard. What it does is it monitors relays, and publishes them according to the NIP-66 spec. I also launched a new relay that anyone can push these events to called monitorlizard.nostr1.com

https://github.com/relaytools/monitorlizard