Why Nostr? What is Njump?
2025-06-19 19:31:55
in reply to

Dikaios1517 on Nostr: There's a good reason I never have to deal with spam. Follow my guide and you won't ...

There's a good reason I never have to deal with spam. Follow my guide and you won't either.
quoting

Tired of dealing with spam? You’re not alone. Here is a guide to picking relays that are good at keeping spam out, without sacrificing your own reach.

If you just want to skip to the relay suggestions, scroll to the sections titled “The Setup.” There is one for users of Haven and one for those who aren’t running their own relay at all.

Client Selection

“Wait, I thought this was a guide about selecting relays, not clients.”

Yes, it is. But what relays you choose doesn’t matter if you are using a client that does not read from your chosen relays, or that hard-codes problematic relays as fallbacks in addition to the relays you selected in an effort to “help you.”

Additionally, some clients have settings that can help make up for poor relay selection using client-side spam mitigation methods. This includes clients like Coracle, Damus, Amethyst, and Nostur. Some may do so via web-of-trust (WoT) filters, so you only see notes and replies from those within your broader social circle, while others will automatically hide notes that those you follow have reported as spam or scams.

Coracle is a great client for dealing with spam, so long as you have gone into your “Content Settings” and set the “Minimum WoT Score” to at least 1. This means you will only see posts from users followed by at least one of the npubs you follow.

Damus also employs WoT, but it appears to be just for notifications, so you only receive notifications for those you follow and those they follow, or “friends of friends,” as Damus put’s it. This can be accessed by toggling it on in your notification tab at the top right, where you see the icon of the person with a check mark.

Nostur has WoT filters for downloading media turned on by default and also uses WoT to filter spam by default. Even better, if you use multiple npubs, you can filter using the WoT of your main npub, while logged into your alternate npubs.

Jumble recently added WoT filtering specifically for interactions. When you load a thread in Jumble, a shield icon will appear near the top right of the page, in line with the tabs for Replies and Quotes. Toggle it on, so the shield is green with a check mark and you will only see replies from those you follow and those your follows follow.

Amethyst does not yet have WoT based filtering built into the client, but it can hide notes that have been reported as spam, scams, impersonation, etc, by those you follow. This is not the most effective way to combat spam, though, since most users aren’t often using the report feature. Hopefully we will see WoT filtering as an option in a future update.

Primal’s apps do not read from any of your selected relays, but rather from their caching server alone. That said, they have a spam filter that is turned on by default so you see relatively little spam, regardless of which relays you use.

For this guide, I recommend using Amethyst for updating your relays, if you possibly can. The reason for this is because Amethyst has the most robust settings for being able to update all of your various relay lists.

Relay Lists Explained

Contrary to what you might think, there is not a single relay list for each user that is stored in a single note, because you can have relays that are used for only one purpose, and not for any other. Each of those purposes for which you might use a particular relay has its own list. That way a Nostr client can tell which relays you want to use for each separate purpose.

While this can make things less approachable for the user, it also means users don’t have to rely on clients to hard code appropriate relays for each of these use-cases. If your client doesn’t let you edit each of these relay lists, chances are they are using a set of relays for that purpose that the developer chose instead of you.

Public Outbox/Inbox Relays

This list of relays is found in your kind 10002 note, if you have one. If you don’t have one, there won’t be any relays shown for these categories in Amethyst. Other clients may fallback to showing you relays from a different list.

This list is intended to be used for Nostr clients to implement the “outbox model” to fetch notes from whatever relays they were written to, even if they aren’t in the requesting user’s relay list. This solves the issue of needing to share relays with those you follow in order to see their notes, allowing Nostr to remain decentralized.

Your “outbox” relays are the ones you write to, or at least the ones you want other users to know that you write to. When you add a relay here, it’s like advertising to everyone, “If you want to see my public-facing notes, look for them on these relays.”

Your “inbox” relays are the ones you read from. On this part of your list you are advertising, “If you want me to see your replies, comments, reactions, and zaps, then send them to these relays.” These relays are massively important for reducing the amount of spam you see. If you have relays listed here that anyone can post to for free, you will almost certainly see a lot of spam in your replies, unless you have WoT filters turned on in your Nostr client.

DM Inbox Relays

This list is found in your kind 10050 note, if you have one, and is a list of relays where you want others to send you Direct Messages. Ideally, you will use a relay or two here that supports AUTH, so that it will only allow direct messages to be retrieved by the user they are addressed to.

What happens if you put a relay in here that doesn’t support AUTH, so it allows anyone to retrieve your DMs? Not much. Anyone who wants to will just be able to see the encrypted content of the message, and depending on the type of DM they will see the identity of the receiver and perhaps also the sender. They will not be able to decrypt what was actually said in the messages. It’s better if they cannot retrieve even that much, though.

Private Relays

This list is found in your 10013 note, if you have one. This is intended for listing a relay that you run yourself and that only you can access, as it will house notes that other users should not be able to see at all, such as eCash tokens and draft notes.

Search Relays

This list is found in your 10007 note, if you have one, and is used to search for notes or users who may not be using the same relays as you. It is good to use relays here that aggregate notes from other relays automatically, and which support NIP-50 for search capability.

Local Relays

This section is for any relays running on the local device, such as Citrine. Because the relays themselves are local, this list is local, as well, and is not saved to any note kind that is saved to your relays like the above lists.

General Relays

This list is found in the “content” tag of your kind 3 note, which is also where all of the npubs you follow are stored. As such, this note is commonly known as your follow list, rather than as a relay list. However, some clients, such as Amethyst, do make use of this list, and others use it as a fallback if they can’t find a kind 10002.

If you are an Amethyst user most of the time, then I would recommend using this list to fill in any gaps that you may have from only writing to a few outbox relays, or only reading from a few inbox relays. It’s a good place to put an aggregator relay, for instance, so long as that relay has good spam filtering, or a blastr relay, so those who don’t yet use a client that supports the outbox model will still likely see your notes.

If you do not generally use Amethyst, then I would recommend you mirror your public inbox/outbox relays here, in case you use a client that cannot find your 10002 list. Relays that are only for outbox should be added as write only, those only for inbox should be added as read only, and those you use for both outbox and inbox should be both read and write.

The Setup (Haven Users)

If you are running your own set of Haven relays, here is the setup I would recommend:

Public Outbox (kind 10002)

Maximum of 4 relays.

  • Your Haven outbox relay (Remember to add some public relays to your blastr)
  • A paid relay of your choice (List available in “Paid Relays” section)
  • A public relay, such as relay.damus.io, relay.primal.net, or nos.lol

Public Inbox (kind 10002)

Maximum of 4 relays.

  • Your Haven inbox relay: [RelayAddress]/inbox
  • A paid relay of your choice (can be same as outbox)
  • A WoT relay of your choice (available in “WoT Relays” section)
  • Optional additional WoT relay

DM Inbox

Maximum of 3 relays.

  • Your Haven “chat” relay: [RelayAddress]/chat
  • An alternate AUTH relay, such as inbox.nostr.wine(paid), nostr.land(paid), or auth.nostr1.com(free).

Private Relays

Maximum of 3 relays.

  • Your Haven private relay: [RelayAddress]/private

Search Relays

Maximum of 4 relays.

  • wss://nostr.wine (even if you don’t pay to write to it)
  • wss://relay.nostr.band
  • wss://relay.noswhere.com
  • wss://search.nos.today

Local Relays

  • Your Citrine IP:Port, if you run Citrine.

General Relays

Assuming you use Amethyst on a regular basis, I recommend the following:

  • A couple additional WoT relays set to read only.
  • An aggregator relay that has good spam filtering, such as wss://aggr.nostr.land(payment required) and/or wss://nostr.wine(paid for write, but can read for free).

The Setup (Not Running Haven)

If you are not running your own set of Haven relays, I would highly recommend you learn how and do so. However, if you decide against it, here is a setup that should suffice:

Public Outbox (kind 10002)

Maximum of 4 relays.

  • A paid relay of your choice (List available in “Paid Relays” section)
  • A large public relay, such as relay.damus.io, relay.primal.net, or nos.lol
  • An additional public relay, but a smaller one, or one-time-payment paid relay.

Public Inbox (kind 10002)

Maximum of 4 relays.

  • A paid relay of your choice (can be same as outbox)
  • wss://nostr.wine - Even if you don’t pay for it, you can read from it.
  • A WoT relay of your choice (available in “WoT Relays” section)
  • Optional additional WoT relay

DM Inbox

Maximum of 3 relays.

  • A paid AUTH relay, such as inbox.nostr.wine or nostr.land.
  • An alternate AUTH relay, such as auth.nostr1.com(free).

Private Relays

Maximum of 3 relays.

  • A private relay you run on your Umbrel or Start9, or that is hosted for you on relay.tools.

Search Relays

Maximum of 4 relays.

  • wss://nostr.wine (even if you don’t pay to write to it)
  • wss://relay.nostr.band
  • wss://relay.noswhere.com
  • wss://search.nos.today

Local Relays

  • Your Citrine IP:Port, if you run Citrine.

General Relays

Assuming you use Amethyst on a regular basis, I recommend the following:

  • A couple additional WoT relays set to read only.
  • An aggregator relay that has good spam filtering, such as wss://aggr.nostr.land(payment required).
  • A blastr relay, such as filter.nostr.wine(paid), or…
  • A few additional public relays set to write only.
  • wss://nostr.land - Details.
  • The Nostr.Wine of relays.
  • wss://jellyfish.land - Details

There are a ton of other paid relays out there that can be found via nostr.watch. The above listed options are simply the most popular with the largest feature-sets.

WoT Relays

These relays will only accept notes from npubs that are within the relay owner’s WoT. I have provided a Jumble.social address for each relay so you can peruse the feed for yourself to see if you want to use it.

Author Public Key
npub1kun5628raxpm7usdkj62z2337hr77f3ryrg9cf0vjpyf4jvk9r9smv3lhe
Seen on
wss://strfry.bonsai.comwss://relay.primal.netwss://offchain.pubwss://relay.damus.io