“Participate in the railway system of the Nostr network through a relay implementation. There are plenty to choose from, including simple-to-set-up options like the one Umbrel offers in their app store. You can download it on your Umbrel node with no real configuration needed, other than directing your Nostr clients to the proper IP address.”

If you consider yourself technologically ‘capable’, you might want to set up a relay linked to a public domain. This would allow anyone to utilize your relay to view and share events taking place within the Nostr ecosystem. Perhaps you might even want to establish a private pay-to-relay’, where you charge a small amount of satoshi for access to a spam-free experience. Paid-to-relays are understandably not attractive to accounts looking to spam or advertise.

Check out the list of relay implementations on Nostr’s official site, and visit their Github page for more details. We recommend the implementation by Cameri/Nostream, as it seems to be one of the most popular due to its helpful, easy-to-follow guides, such as this one at https://andreneves.xyz. Its popularity also lies in the fact that it is a well-balanced implementation. Furthermore, they have a supportive Telegram community that you can tap into for advice.

Once your relay is up and running, you might want to check its status and see what’s happening. Fortunately, there are tools that can help. Popular monitoring tools like Prometheus, combined with Grafana, allow you to collect data in real time. They enable you to create charts and tables that organize events happening in your relay, presenting you with fun and colorful visual representations.

You can find the Docker Compose guide to set this up on Docker Hub. With all this setup, you have almost everything you need to run and monitor your relays. You can always set up two relays—one for public use and one for paid users—or even more if you want to go all out.

You can download our custom Grafana dashboard from our relay tools page once you have everything set up.

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