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Relays

Nostr relay

The small servers that store and forward signed events on Nostr.

A relay is a WebSocket server that accepts, stores, and serves Nostr events. Clients connect to several relays at once. Writing a note means sending the same signed event to each of them. Reading a feed means subscribing to filters on each of them and merging the results.

Relays do not need to know about each other. They do not need to trust each other. Each one is independently replaceable. A user who does not like a relay's policy can drop it and pick another without losing their identity or their history, as long as some other relay has a copy of the events they care about.

Different relays optimize for different things: large public archives, small paid relays with strict spam filters, private relays for a single user, or specialized relays that only accept a specific kind of event. Implementations include strfry, nostr-rs-relay, and relay.tools.

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