The ecosystem

A city with no city hall

So far we’ve looked at Nostr up close: one keypair, one event, one relay at a time. Now let’s climb the tallest tree and look at the whole forest.

Picture a city where nobody owns the roads. Anyone can open a post office (a relay), anyone can build a car (a client, the app you read and write with), and the traffic rules (the NIPs) are written in public, in a notebook anyone can propose changes to. There’s no mayor, no census bureau, and no official phone book.

Which raises a fun question: if nobody is in charge, how do you even count the city?

Counting a network that has no list

There is no registry of relays. Spinning one up is like opening a lemonade stand: you don’t ask permission. So instead of asking a central authority, we ask the network itself.

Volunteer monitors constantly knock on relays’ doors: “Are you open? What do you support? Do you charge?” Then they publish what they found as ordinary, signed Nostr events. Anyone can read those reports with a normal filter, exactly like reading notes. That’s what our snapshot script did: it asked three monitor relays for every report from the last 24 hours, checked every signature, and tallied the results.

{
  "kind": 30166,
  "pubkey": "<monitor pubkey>",
  "content": "{\"software\":\"git+https://github.com/hoytech/strfry.git\",\"supported_nips\":[1,2,4,9,11,40]}",
  "tags": [
    ["d", "wss://some.relay/"],
    ["n", "clearnet"],
    ["N", "1"], ["N", "11"], ["N", "40"],
    ["R", "!payment"],
    ["R", "auth"],
    ["rtt-open", "234"]
  ]
}

import { SimplePool } from "nostr-tools/pool";
import { verifyEvent } from "nostr-tools/pure";

const pool = new SimplePool();
const since = Math.floor(Date.now() / 1000) - 24 * 3600;
const reports = await pool.querySync(["wss://relay.nostr.watch"], { kinds: [30166], since });
const relays = new Set(
  reports.filter(verifyEvent).map((e) => e.tags.find((t) => t[0] === "d")?.[1]),
);
console.log(`${relays.size} relays reported in the last 24h`);

Explore the snapshot

Here’s the city from above. Hop between the four views: Relays (who is running the post offices), NIPs (which traffic rules they follow), Growth (how the rulebook grew) and Clients (which cars you can drive). Visit all four for a little celebration.

What the relay numbers tell us

Look at the Relays view and two things jump out.

Diversity. No single program runs the network. A handful of open-source relay programs (strfry, nostr-rs-relay, haven, khatru-based relays and many more) split the work, and a long tail of homemade ones fill in the gaps. If one of them had a bug tomorrow, the others would keep humming. That’s censorship resistance in practice: there’s no single off switch.

Choice. Most relays are free and open, but some ask for payment (a paid relay) or ask you to log in first with NIP-42 before reading or writing. Those are trade-offs, not bugs: payment and login are some of the best tools relays have against spam. A few relays also live on Tor or I2P, for people who need to hide where they connect from.

const res = await fetch("https://relay.damus.io", {
  headers: { Accept: "application/nostr+json" },
});
const info = await res.json();
console.log(info.software, info.supported_nips, info.limitation?.payment_required);

NIPs: a rulebook you can pick from

A NIP (Nostr Implementation Possibility) is a short public document describing one feature: how follow lists work, how zaps work, how private messages work. Only NIP-01 is truly shared by everyone: it’s the basic grammar of events, signatures and the REQ/EVENT/EOSE conversation. Everything else is optional.

Think of it like a restaurant menu rather than a law book. Each relay and each app picks the dishes it wants to serve. That’s why, in the NIPs view, NIP-01 is nearly universal while newer ideas are still catching on. You’ll also notice some veterans like NIP-12, NIP-16, NIP-20 and NIP-33: those were folded into NIP-01 long ago, but many relays still list them, a nice reminder that the network upgrades slowly and unevenly.

The Growth view shows the rulebook getting thicker over time. Drag the slider back to 2022 and watch it grow. Growth isn’t only additions, either: a number of NIPs are now marked unrecommended (the old NIP-04 direct messages, for example, gave way to NIP-17). Nobody can delete a feature from the network, so old and new live side by side.

git clone --filter=blob:none --no-checkout https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips
cd nips
git log --first-parent -m --no-renames --diff-filter=A --name-only --format=@%aI HEAD

So many apps, one identity

Open the Clients view and filter by the device in your pocket. There’s something for every taste: Twitter-style timelines, photo feeds, group chats, long-form blogs, live streams, even a marketplace and an app store.

Here’s the trick, and it’s the whole reason this ecosystem can exist: the apps don’t own you. Your identity is your key, your posts sit on relays, and your follow list is just another event. Log into any of these apps with the same key and your followers, your posts and your profile are all there. Switching apps is like switching web browsers: the websites don’t care.

That also means apps compete on being good, not on holding your friends hostage. Don’t like how one app looks? Try another this afternoon. You lose nothing.

Reading ecosystem stats like a pro

Every Nostr dashboard you’ll find online shows different numbers, and that’s normal. Before you trust a figure, ask three questions:

1. Who measured it, and how? Our relays come from NIP-66 monitors; another site might crawl relay lists from user profiles, and get a bigger (or smaller) number.
2. When? Relays come and go daily. Our snapshot shows its date at the top of the page.
3. What’s missing? Private relays, relays monitors haven’t discovered yet, and apps that never listed themselves are invisible to any census.

That’s not a weakness to hide. A network nobody owns is a network nobody can fully count, and that’s exactly the point.

Quick check