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Question: I keep seeing the recommendations to add only up to 3-4 inbound & outbound relays. Yet I see many users adding 10-20 relays. 🙀 Can someone provide guidance on whether we really should keep it to 3-4 max? Realistically, do those who add 20 relays have further reach? Tagging two devs I've spoken with recently, maybe you folks could enlighten us? @npub1cesr...t37c @Vitor Pamplona Thank you! 🙏 #asknostr

Replies (12)

You can potentially increase reach to users who don't use outbox model enabled clients by adding more outbound relays. For all other users you might decrease your reach if you add bad relays. Just choose 3-5 good ones
The "add a bunch of relays so you get more reach" is a leftover mentality from when relays were quite basic and general purpose. Now we have the outbox model in many clients, so that even if those who follow you haven't selected ANY relays you are writing to as "read" relays, they will still see your notes, because their client will look for your relay list and pull your notes from the relays YOU say that you write to. Additionally, many folks are reading from relays that aggregate notes from other relays, after filtering for spam, such as nostr.wine, or nostr.land, or even their own Web-of-Trust relay. You don't need to actively post to these relays, as they will pull your notes in from wherever you are writing to, so long as you are writing to one of the relays they pull from. The more relays you have listed as "write" relays, the more places Nostr clients have to look for your notes using the outbox model, slowing down the client and using a LOT of bandwidth. Realistically, after the first 3 or 4 relays, all of the notes received from the rest will almost certainly be duplicates. If you are concerned that some people who aren't yet following you might not see your notes if they aren't reading from the relays you are posting to, then the answer is to use a blastr relay such as filter.nostr.wine as one of your outbox relays. You can also run your own HAVEN relay, which has a blastr feature. These relays automatically rebroadcast your notes to a set list of relays without those relays needing to be in your relay list.
↩ replying to Dikaios1517
Thank you very much! This answer is highly informative. So, I originally joined in 2023, and I suppose that's where this "leftover mentality" that you mentioned is probably from. This explains a lot about what's changed (I didn't use nostr for ~2 years and only recently came back), and I understand better now that I don't really need that many relays at all, anymore. I host my own public relay right now (nostr-rs-relay), but I may definitely look into setting up a haven for my personal usage, thanks so much for this tip--I had no idea haven existed! I took a brief look at the docs and it seems like the ideal solution for managing all of this. 🙏😻
↩ replying to Dikaios1517
I will likely be looking to self-host it without umbrel, I prefer to get my hands dirty with the terminal and manual configuration anyways, it's always been my preferred way to set things up! Reading about haven, I really want to set it up right now, but it's late here, so I shall have to try to make time for that tomorrow instead! 😹
↩ replying to arfonzo
Yup, if you have the technical know-how, then going the terminal install and manual configuration route is best. I installed HAVEN that way for this npub, and would happily do so again. It's nice to have a more approachable version for less technical users, though. It would be great if more Nostr users were running their own personal relays for more than just keeping a backup copy of their notes.