Nerostr: a Nostr paid relay, but with Monero (new version)

Hey, lately I've been working on a new Nerostr version, with upgraded inner workings and UI, which is now released and ready to be used in production.

Check it out live here: https://xmr.usenostr.org

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What is this?

For anyone who does not know what Nerostr is, it is an expensive relay for Nostr that is paid with Monero. Since most relays in the nostr space are bitcoin-centric, there was no option to set up a paid relay that accepted monero, so I came up with this project!

Why?

Nostr lacks spam filtering and control, so the option that developers came up with (among others that are work in progress) is what's known as “Pay-to-relay”.

In order to avoid spam in your feed, you pay a small fee (~$1 or less) to a relay. Your pubkey gets whitelisted in that relay, and then you are free to publish events there. Reading from such relays is free for everyone! This allows getting much more curated and clean results in the global page. In short, paid relays are a pretty neat thing for Nostr.

Personally, I was lacking Monero in this equation. Right now, 100% of the Nostr paid relays are being paid in Bitcoin (via LN). For this, I decided I would create a Monero-paid relay so the Monero community starts having a play in Nostr!

What is Nostr?

It is a lightweight, simple yet extensible open protocol that allows building truly censorship resistant and decentralized social media platforms:

• There are two components: events and relays.
• Every user is identified by a public key. Every post is signed. Clients validate these signatures.
• Clients fetch data from relays of their choice and publish data to other relays of their choice. A relay doesn't talk to another relay, only directly to users.
• For example, to "follow" someone, a user instructs their client to query the relays it knows for posts from that public key.
• A "post" can contain any kind of structured data, but the most used ones are going to find their way into the standard so all clients and relays can handle them seamlessly.

You can learn more about Nostr in this site I maintain: https://usenostr.org

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New version highlights

This new version is a simplified version of the previous project. The main highlights are:

• Uses Strfry as the nostr relay, which is a fast and efficient nostr relay written in C++. The old one used rs-relay.
• Better and fun retro UI (inspired by kyun.host design, which I like a lot)
• 12MB paywall image (vs 50MB paywall image in the old one)
• Only 3 Docker services (vs 6 services in the old one)
• User status check, and expiring invoices.
• Many improvements in the paywall, internal APIs, error handling, etc.