purplepages is a special kind of relay.
Literally:
it only handles a special event kind:
event kinds
0 and 10002.
The goal of this relay is that you will very easily be able to find:
This relay will also serve a new event kind,
11002.
These events will not be signed by each individual user, but rather, by this relay's key: @npub1pages...
These events will be regularly updated to include the most recent information of where to find
each users, specified in a format compatible with event
11002.
One of the big questions that remains open about Nostr is whether we have a model that can remain sufficiently decentralized.
Current clients' behavior incentivizes users to coalesce around a few big relays so that notes can easily be found by other users.
The gossip model is an attempt to address this question, by providing the mechanics for clients to spread out and use different, smaller, relays, without sacrificing discoverability and addressing the issue of events not being found.
One of the lingering questions from the gossip model is how the
10002 events,
which specify where users can be found, will themselves be found.
The original proposal contemplates the use of a DHT to solve this problem, although those come packed with their own set of problems and further complexity for clients (since now they have to support this other protocol in addition to Nostr).
The goal of this relay is to help with bootstrapping this discoverability problem within the nostr protocol itself.
If you would like to run a relay like this one, DM me. The crawler is open-source, but a bit hard to set up.