Feeds: Follows or Relays? Both.
Your follow feed consists of notes by your contacts, hashtags, and communities. This generally works in one of two ways:
- Your client connects to an array of relays that your follows have announced that they write to, in order to find their notes. This is referred to as the outbox model. This helps to ensure that the posts that matter to you are making it to your feed, at the cost of slightly higher data consumption and sometimes slower speeds. This is decentralized social at its maximum capacity. Many users, many relays, and no fear of being cut off from your social circles.
- Your client connects a predefined set of relays. Your client then requests notes from your follows from only these relays. Some, such as proxy and filter relays, may do a better job of collecting and serving the appropriate posts. This static relay model saves on bandwidth, but may trade off on reliability. Should your contacts choose to publish to other relays, they may go completely unseen. This has a centralizing effect, in that no one wants to be cut off from their friends so they are less likely to publish other places.
What does this have to do with feed comparisons and why is it important? Simply stated, Nostr fails to be censorship resistant, if it fails to decentralize. Big, crowded relays become giant servers and the past repeats itself. Data consumption isn't the only gravitational pull towards centralization, though. Exposure and discovery also play key parts in this battle.
Your follow feed:
It is important. We use this to keep up with the things and people that matter to us, keeping us informed, connected, and entertained. The "follow" action also lends social accreditation, bringing people away from accidentally being labeled as spam on the network. The chronological nature of most follow feeds is also a refreshing change from the algorithmic hellscapes that keep so many under their spells. We can feel life flow more naturally in our follow feed, as people move throughout their days, in different time zones around the world. In a lot of ways, your Nostr follow feed is the most human experience you will find online. It also has the same limitations as in real life, in that synchronicity and organic happenstance take precedent in how encounter new subjects and people. This can lead to beautiful, meaningful connections, but this is not something we can expect to happen on a predictable basis. The siren song of the algorithms of yore beckon loudest when we are bored. We want to seek and find new, interesting, things. We seek stimulation from a screen that has for so long provided endless entertainment. To stave this off, some will advise to follow lots of people. Others try to calculate just how to develop these algorithms, in an environment in which they will flounder without a centralized pool of the notes and other stuff. Another solution exists.
Relay feeds:
Until recently, accessing the contents of a single relay had been difficult and cumbersome. There has been lots of progress in multiple clients, to make that experience more accessible to the average user. This enables an ecosystem of unique and powerful relays to grow and expand. Experiments involving user-centric algorithms, communities, topics, languages, user actions, and curation have begun to appear. Plainly, this is the discovery mechanism that the network has lacked. The contents of any public relay can be accessed and browsed. Some relays have leverage conditional interactions. Others are more strictly for browsing, with the intention of acting as discovery and nothing more. All the while, the outbox method discussed above enables these discovery relays to still maintain the social aspects we expect from a social feed, while also bringing a more consistent distribution of the data redundancy that makes Nostr so powerful. If your follow feed is feeling stale or you simply want to find something new and fresh, check out this list of clients and begin your expedition. Your follow feed will still be there when you're ready to go back. New people can and will work their way into the network through interacting, more simply and genuinely than if they were attempting to stand out in the chaos of "global" feeds. If I were to offer advice for anyone new to Nostr, I would tell them to explore and interact in unique relay feeds, follow who and what you find and enjoy. Build a follow list that you love and use it for just that.