@asknostr
I'm trying to figure out the whole relay thing.
I send a note 3 times using primal (npub12vk…pugg) desktop, every time connecting to different relays.
Good to know: I am a new user with 6 followers (including myself) and 192 following. This will give me probably a low WoT score, but it will be the case for many new people who come into nostr.
To check which relays accepted my notes, I used Coracle (npub13my…v3qk) (shout out to hodlbod (npub1jlr…ynqn) for his amazing work)
TRIAL 1 - standard primal relays
3 relays accepted my note:
- nostr.oxtr.dev
- relay.damus.io
- relay.nostr.band
The strange thing is that only relay.damus.io was in my relay list, the others were not. Not sure where they came from, unless there is a delay in (dis)connecting to relays?
I also was very surprised that relay.primal.net did not accept my note
TRIAL 2 - relays that are advised online (google search)
I connected to 13 relays in total, including nos.lol and relay.snort.social
3 relays accepted my note:
- nostr.oxtr.dev
- relay.mostr.pub
- relay.damus.io
So, all these 3 relays were in the list of 13, so basically my note got rejected by 10
TRIAL 3 - the WoT relays that are advised because of spam.
I was curious to see what would happen for a new user like me
I connected to 15 WoT relays.
The only 2 relays that accepted my note:
- nostr.oxtr.dev/
- relay.damus.io/
Both those 2 relays were not in my relay list
QUESTIONS
1) Is there indeed a delay between connecting to relays and the actual usage of relays to accept your notes? This could explain some of the relays accepting my notes while they are not in my relay list
2) Is there a way for new users to get some engagement on their notes? With a low WoT score, I think their notes are rejected by many relays. Even if they are connected to 10+ relays, it is likely that their notes are only accepted by one or two relays. What are the best 5 relays to be connected to as a new user?
3) Is there a reason that I cannot see my own posts in my primal (desktop) feed? A few days ago, I could see my own posts in my feed, but that seems to have disappeared. I assumed this had to do with relays, and this started my initial investigation.
4) What can be the reason that in primal I see 5 reactions on my earlier post, but in Coracle I see an extra reply by someone? Can this be relay - related?
A long rambling, I know, but I try to figure out how all these parts work together. Because I want to build on Nostr, without users having to understand anything about the underlying plumbing. For that to succeed, I will need to understand it myself 😉 )
Mental note: get my wallet filled up, so I can start zapping the helpful community.
How can we improve this? I think the main fault is with primal here (just because pbeta (nprofile…c4d0) is using it), for blocking notes from its own users, and not showing relay publish failures (maybe?). But the criticisms apply to all clients.
Probably the root issue is that relay policy is hard to infer via nip 11 and notice/ok messages. It's also one of those unglamorous chores like error handling that no devs (except go devs) enjoy.