Dikaios1517 on Nostr: There is no NEED to add any other relays. Get used to not being able to see ...

There is no NEED to add any other relays. Get used to not being able to see EVERYTHING that is ever posted to Nostr. It's not possible. You will only ever see the majority of what is being posted, at best. This is by design. Nostr is truly decentralized, so there can never truly be a global state. Even in centralized platforms, you never actually see EVERYTHING. They just use an algorithm to show you what they think you will want to see.

Now, with that said, you absolutely can optimize your relays, and use clients that allow you to explore other parts of the network that you might not otherwise see.

If you are using Amethyst, you have a ton of relay settings you can fiddle with. The two most important settings are going to be your Public Outbox and Public Inbox relays.

The outbox relays are going to be the ones you write your notes to, and where others will read your notes from. You just need 2 or 3 relays here. A couple big public relays work well, and some day you might want to run your own outbox relay that only you can write to but anyone can read from. relay.damus.io, nos.lol, or relay.primal.net all work well for public outbox relays if you want the majority of folks on the network to easily be able to find your notes.

Inbox relays are going to be the relays that you read from and that other users will post notes to when they want to make sure you see their notes, such as when they reply to you. These need to be relays that they will have write access to, so they can be public relays or web-of-trust relays, if you only want to see replies from relatively trusted users, rather than potentially getting a lot of reply spam. You can try out using a couple public relays like relay.damus.io and/or relay.primal.net for this option, but if you find you get a lot of reply spam, you can add a web-of-trust relay like wot.utxo.com and REMOVE the public relays.

Next is your DM inbox relay. Ideally, this will be a specialized relay specifically for receiving DMs, because the relay will allow anyone to write to it, but it will also only allow the npub to whom the DM is addressed to read it. DMs are encrypted, of course, but it's still better if the relay won't even allow others to fetch DMs that are addressed to you. Amethyst has a couple recommended relays listed, one of which is free: auth.nostr1.com

Private Home Relays aren't something you need to be too concerned with at first. They just give you a private place to store your drafts and app settings. But since private relays are only for you to be able to read or write to, you would need to be running your own.

Go with Amethyst's defaults for search relays, unless you hear of a search relay that you want to try out.

Local relay would be your Citrine relay, if you are running it. If you aren't, I highly recommend you give it a try. You can get it from greenart7c3 (npub1w4u…0jr5)'s GitHub, or you can download it from the Zapstore, which is a Nostr integrated alternate appstore for Android.

Finally, you have the list of general relays. This is where you can fill in some of the gaps left by your relay selections above. You can add more relays here and toggle on and off what you want them used for. For instance, you might want a relay to be used for fetching notes that have been quoted in your home feed (so you see the "this note cannot be found on your relays" less) but you don't want it to be used for your global feed, so you don't have to see the spam that might be on that relay. A good one to have for that sort of purpose is relay.nostr.band. Meanwhile, you may want to have a few web-of-trust relays used for your global feed, so you get a pretty wide sampling of what's on the network from people you don't follow, but without having to deal with so much spam. Another good relay to add here is nostr.wine, even if you don't pay for it. You can add it just to read from it since it has decent spam filtering and a lot of other users post to it.

When it comes to whether folks are receiving your DMs, Nostr DMs are currently a bit of a mess. This is mainly due to not all clients using the same type of DMs. Some are using an OLD and DEPRECATED spec for DMs as defined in NIP-04, and others are using the newer and more privacy preserving spec as defined in NIP-17. Other clients have both.

If you are writing DMs in Amethyst and someone else isn't receiving them, it's most likely because they are using a client that still only has NIP-04 DMs. Tell them to use a client like Amethyst, Coracle, or 0xChat so they can see your DMs.

Ignore your follower count. It will always change no matter what relays you use. It will only ever be an approximate number and never 100% accurate. This is because follow count is determined by trying to find all follow lists that exist on any relay that include your npub. If a relay is down that has a follow list with your npub on it, then the number won't be accurate. If a relay exists that your client doesn't know to check, the number won't be accurate. If someone only has you on a private follow list, where all the npubs are encrypted, the number won't be accurate.