[App request] Nostr relay

General Discussions
#1

I did a quick search and didn’t find anything… if I missed it this post can probably be deleted. Has there been any consideration to add a Nostr relay? Seems like interest is picking up and many relays are being strained. Would be great to have an easy way to boot a relay with Umbrel.

Edit: will also add that after learning more about the protocol, running a personal relay is likely a great fit for having a trustless data backup even if the relay doesn’t serve many people. Great fit for umbrel.

19 Likes
#2

2nd this

#3

+1

#4

this is ver much needed!

#5

Need

#6

Yes please

#7

Yes, I want this!

#8

I looked into setting up a Nostr relay, but it would be SO awesome to just have this as an Umbrel app!

#9

Seems like a great idea. I don’t know what sort of extra demands it would put on the system and network.

#10

+1

#11

Bootstrapping a Nostr relay doesn’t seem quite difficult. I gave a try with nostr-rs-relay implementation here.

However a few points that should be taken in consideration :

  • Providing only a relay means there is no client/front interface provided. Is this acceptable to have applications that provide only back-end services ? Otherwise a client or a monitoring tool should be provided along the relay.
  • Is handling a relay on a Rasperry Pi relevant ? I have no idea about resources consumption on handling such a relay and how it grows as people uses it.
  • Security : Umbrel does not provide - afaik - SSL regarding clearnet accesses. This means that client must support ws instead of wss, which might not be supported by all clients ( e.g: nostr-watch doesn’t handle details of non wss relays )
  • Tor support: An aswer to previous point could be considering use being tor relays only for nostr, which would be kind of limiting usage as many clients don’t handle tor support.
1 Like
#12

Well, well nostr relay on mynodebtc

Let’s get it on Umbrel

Selection_006

#13

Nice! My personal opinion on your questions/comments after being neck deep in nostr for a few weeks:

  • a monitoring tool would be great. Really though I think all that would be needed is the ability to configure whitelists for the relay and possibly monitor data usage - though these might not even require a real interface to start. I also see no reason this couldn’t just be an extra component that would be an optional install.
  • I also wondered about relevance on a raspberry pi right after I started this thread. I do think it’s relevant - not as a public relay, but possibly as a private relay (especially as a way to back up data to your own relay). If the relay is not exposed to the wild the whitelist config probably isn’t as important either.
  • Following off the previous bullet, I think operating a backup node that is only accessible over a ws:// connection over something like Tailscale would be the most common usage as a backup. This is what I would likely do personally. It would be trivial to hook up your own relay to any client running on a device with Tailscale connected.
  • I haven’t seen much discussion regarding tor at all and I don’t think it needs to be a consideration. Reliability is a challenge with nostr clients even without having to worry about the stability of tor.
#14

Regarding the monitoring tool i’ve been trying to use nostr-watch.

The overview detects the node but the detail view fails as it expects a wss:// node. A request could be made to the maintainer of nostr-watch to handle such case though.

#15

Feel free to re-use what i’ve pushed on github and add a service that would load Astral client.

Otherwise i’ll see if i can give it a try next week-end but with no guarantee of it.

#16

Just tried it :

Capture d’écran 2023-01-09 à 20.31.50
Capture d’écran 2023-01-09 à 20.31.502880×1714 350 KB

Seems to work globally but there are still many errors ( CORS related and other ones that i don’t know what they are related to) when i try to edit relays and stuff.

There’s a topic about Astral on umbrel here

EDIT : Quick update after discussing with Astral project developer.

It seems that without SSL, for now, it won’t be possible to use effectively the client on Umbrel.

See shared topic above for more details.

1 Like
#17

+1