Relay Setup 101

If you don't know where your posts are, you might as well just stay in the centralized Twitter. You either take control of your relay lists, or they will control you. Amethyst offers several lists of relays for our users. We are going to go one by one to help clarify what they are and which options are best for each one.

Public Home/Outbox Relays

Home relays store all YOUR content: all your posts, likes, replies, lists, etc. It's your home. Amethyst will send your posts here first. Your followers will use these relays to get new posts from you. So, if you don't have anything there, they will not receive your updates.

Home relays must allow queries from anyone, ideally without the need to authenticate. They can limit writes to paid users without affecting anyone's experience.

This list should have a maximum of 3 relays. More than that will only make your followers waste their mobile data getting your posts. Keep it simple. Out of the 3 relays, I recommend:

• 1 large public, international relay: nos.lol, nostr.mom, relay.damus.io, etc.
• 1 personal relay to store a copy of all your content in a place no one can delete. Go to relay.tools and never be censored again.
• 1 really fast relay located in your country: paid options like http://nostr.wine are great

Do not include relays that block users from seeing posts in this list. If you do, no one will see your posts.

Public Inbox Relays

This relay type receives all replies, comments, likes, and zaps to your posts. If you are not getting notifications or you don't see replies from your friends, it is likely because you don't have the right setup here. If you are getting too much spam in your replies, it's probably because your inbox relays are not protecting you enough. Paid relays can filter inbox spam out.

Inbox relays must allow anyone to write into them. It's the opposite of the outbox relay. They can limit who can download the posts to their paid subscribers without affecting anyone's experience.

This list should have a maximum of 3 relays as well. Again, keep it small. More than that will just make you spend more of your data plan downloading the same notifications from all these different servers. Out of the 3 relays, I recommend:

• 1 large public, international relay: nos.lol, nostr.mom, relay.damus.io, etc.
• 1 personal relay to store a copy of your notifications, invites, cashu tokens and zaps.
• 1 really fast relay located in your country: go to nostr.watch and find relays in your country

Terrible options include:

• nostr.wine should not be here.
• filter.nostr.wine should not be here.
• inbox.nostr.wine should not be here.

DM Inbox Relays

These are the relays used to receive DMs and private content. Others will use these relays to send DMs to you. If you don't have it setup, you will miss DMs. DM Inbox relays should accept any message from anyone, but only allow you to download them.

Generally speaking, you only need 3 for reliability. One of them should be a personal relay to make sure you have a copy of all your messages. The others can be open if you want push notifications or closed if you want full privacy.

Good options are:

• inbox.nostr.wine and auth.nostr1.com: anyone can send messages and only you can download. Not even our push notification server has access to them to notify you.
• a personal relay to make sure no one can censor you. Advanced settings on personal relays can also store your DMs privately. Talk to your relay operator for more details.
• a public relay if you want DM notifications from our servers.

Make sure to add at least one public relay if you want to see DM notifications.

Private Home Relays

Private Relays are for things no one should see, like your drafts, lists, app settings, bookmarks etc. Ideally, these relays are either local or require authentication before posting AND downloading each user's content. There are no dedicated relays for this category yet, so I would use a local relay like Citrine on Android and a personal relay on relay.tools.

Keep in mind that if you choose a local relay only, a client on the desktop might not be able to see the drafts from clients on mobile and vice versa.

Search relays:

This is the list of relays to use on Amethyst's search and user tagging with @. Tagging and searching will not work if there is nothing here.. This option requires NIP-50 compliance from each relay. Hit the Default button to use all available options on existence today:

• nostr.wine
• relay.nostr.band
• relay.noswhere.com

Local Relays:

This is your local storage. Everything will load faster if it comes from this relay. You should install Citrine on Android and write ws://localhost:4869 in this option.

General Relays:

This section contains the default relays used to download content from your follows. Notice how you can activate and deactivate the Home, Messages (old-style DMs), Chat (public chats), and Global options in each.

Keep 5-6 large relays on this list and activate them for as many categories (Home, Messages (old-style DMs), Chat, and Global) as possible.

Amethyst will provide additional recommendations to this list from your follows with information on which of your follows might need the additional relay in your list. Add them if you feel like you are missing their posts or if it is just taking too long to load them.

My setup

Here's what I use:

1. Go to relay.tools and create a relay for yourself.
2. Go to nostr.wine and pay for their subscription.
3. Go to inbox.nostr.wine and pay for their subscription.
4. Go to nostr.watch and find a good relay in your country.
5. Download Citrine to your phone.

Then, on your relay lists, put:

Public Home/Outbox Relays:

• nostr.wine
• nos.lol or an in-country relay.
• <your.relay>.nostr1.com

Public Inbox Relays

• nos.lol or an in-country relay
• <your.relay>.nostr1.com

DM Inbox Relays

• inbox.nostr.wine
• <your.relay>.nostr1.com

Private Home Relays

• ws://localhost:4869 (Citrine)
• <your.relay>.nostr1.com (if you want)

Search Relays

• nostr.wine
• relay.nostr.band
• relay.noswhere.com

Local Relays

• ws://localhost:4869 (Citrine)

General Relays

• nos.lol
• relay.damus.io
• relay.primal.net
• nostr.mom

And a few of the recommended relays from Amethyst.

Final Considerations

Remember, relays can see what your Nostr client is requesting and downloading at all times. They can track what you see and see what you like. They can sell that information to the highest bidder, they can delete your content or content that a sponsor asked them to delete (like a negative review for instance) and they can censor you in any way they see fit. Before using any random free relay out there, make sure you trust its operator and you know its terms of service and privacy policies.