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@ Mazin
2025-05-21 15:48:47
We registered the 🍷 nostr.wine domain name on February 2, 2023 and I setup a nostream (shoutout to nostr:npub1qqqqqqyz0la2jjl752yv8h7wgs3v098mh9nztd4nr6gynaef6uqqt0n47m) paid relay on it the following day.
The pay-to-write price was 888 sats and bitcoin was in the 20k range. Back then my rule was if you sent me your admission invoice, I’d pay it for you. The fee was just a spam deterrent and we were just starting to experiment with nostr.
Paid relays were just getting started as a concept back then and there were lots of new ones popping up daily. I think I signed up to at least 15 other ones, maybe more. They had modest one-time fees and I viewed these more as donations to support relay operators than as an actual payment for a service.
Seeing some of the other relay prices and performance, we decided to migrate to Strfry (thank you nostr:npub1yxprsscnjw2e6myxz73mmzvnqw5kvzd5ffjya9ecjypc5l0gvgksh8qud4), build our own custom BTCPayServer integration, and raise the price to 8888 sats.
Spam was just starting to become an issue on free relays so users started to experiment with reading ONLY from these new paid relays. They were spam free but they were also missing a lot of the content users expected to see.
Enter 🍷 filter.nostr.wine - our custom bridge to free relays, without the spam. Truthfully, nostr:npub1qlkwmzmrhzpuak7c2g9akvcrh7wzkd7zc7fpefw9najwpau662nqealf5y and I built Filter for ourselves. We wanted to avoid reading directly from several free relays but without losing access to the free-relay content we found interesting. We also wanted to be able to write our events to those free relays without connecting to them.
Filter.nostr.wine is an aggregator relay that pulls events from the largest free relays in real time and broadcasts user events back to those relays. When our users view their global feed on filter, we automatically apply a follows+follows filter to the feed so that you’re only viewing notes from your extended network.
Since Filter was a heavier relay to run that offered valuable functionality outside of normal note storage/retention, we decided to make Filter a subscription service and give nostr.wine users a few free months to help with the transition. We also raised the nostr.wine price to 18888. We weren’t sure if anyone would be willing to pay an ongoing fee to use it, but we gave it a try and nostriches supported us.
With this support, we were able to add NIP-50 search, add new global views (all vs your network), and add NIP-65 broadcasting. We also reinvested some of the sats back in to nostr. We paid out 4 seperate bounties to nostr client developers to integrate NIP-42 client authentication.
Towards the end of last year, we made a large change to our aggregator data pipeline. “Purgatory” was released to combat new user spam without losing coverage of real users. You can learn more about filter.nostr.wine and the rest of our services here: https://docs.nostr.wine/filter/readme
We want to thank all of you who have supported us throughout our first 27 months of operation. This is not our full time job but it’s our passion project and we are dedicated to providing the most reliable paid relay on nostr.
Here is to another 27 months🍷💜