brugeman on Nostr: So Vitor Pamplona came up with NIP-97 for recommendation services. Part of the idea ...

So Vitor Pamplona (npub1gcx…nj5z) came up with NIP-97 for recommendation services.

Part of the idea is that each recommendation service has a pubkey, profile, etc, and you start using it by 'subscribing' (kinda like following). The reason it's cool is that users can discover those services within nostr itself, can choose which of them to subscribe to, can build lists of services, can share them, zap them etc. It's decentralizing the 'app store' of aggregation algorithms. See

quoting note1cwu…jjk0

Cooking a recommendation engine connect with brugeman (npub1xdt…ntxy)

Now, how about relays? Suppose each relay has it's own pubkey, a profile (which indicates that it's a relay), and clients would allow users to start using the relay by 'subscribing', similar to how you follow a person.

Benefits:
- easier to discover relays using the same discovery mechanisms we're building for nostr
- counting relay subscribers and WoT checks of relays become possible to simplify relay selection
- relay selection experience becomes more intuitive, it's just like following a profile
- you can zap them, list them, share relay lists, zap relay lists, follow relay lists...
- relay can specify it's urls on nostr events, which means DNS censorship no longer matters - relay can publish new url and keep all subscribers

There is a question of how to discover relay urls on restart, but I think it's solvable.

Since we're making the whole world nostr-native, why not start with relays?