nostr.watch update November 2023

The last 6 months has been full full of unexpected surprises, of the unpleasant variety. So it was welcomed news that nostrwatch was awarded a grant by OpenSats recently which has allowed me to revisit this project and build out my original vision, the one I had before nostr went vertical.

The last month has been a bit of a joyride, in that I have met little friction meeting goals. For example I was able to rewrite nostrwatch-js in an evening, tests another evening and did most of the Typescript conversion in 30 minutes (thanks AI!)

Here's a quick summary of the last month, I'm probably missing a handful of details, but these are the important bits.

1. Went through all the new NIPs, prototyped and experimented
2. Nearly completed a full rewrite of nostrwatch-js, now nocap. Presently porting to Typescript. Still alpha, don’t use it.
3. Released nostrawl, a wrapper for nostr-fetch that has Queue adapters for persistent fetching. Nothing special, but needed to factor out the functionality from the legacy trawler and the requirements were general enough to make it a package.
4. Starting porting the nostr.watch trawler, cache layer and rest API, but much work is still needed there. Aiming to have the current infrastructure updated with new daemons by end of year.
5. In concert with the cache layer testing, I ran some experiments by patching in a rough trend engine prototype from earlier this year and a novel outbox solution, both with promising results.
6. Wrote a few small CLI tools to assist with developments, got acquainted with ink, and reacquainted myself with wonderful world of ES Module conflicts.

The rest of this year will be mostly backend work, tests and data engineering. Early next year I will begin iterative development on a new GUI and a string of CLI tools.

Luckily, nostr.watch and it's underlying infrastructure, as abysmal as it is, hasn't completely sank. Traffic is much lower than the ATH but still hovering between 2-3k unique visitors a month. I can't express in words how happy I will be when I can put the legacy nostr.watch to rest.

Next update will include a bit more of the why and how, and where I am trying to get to with this project.

Until next time.