Valley of the Commons

A nostr relay for the commons

This machine runs a nostr relay and a Blossom media server. Anyone can read from the relay; here is how to point your client at it.

What is this?

Nostr is a protocol for social apps where you own your identity as a keypair rather than an account on someone’s server. Relays are the dumb pipes: they store notes and hand them to whoever asks. Running our own means the community’s conversation does not live or die with a company.

Blossom is the same idea for files. Images, audio and PDFs are addressed by their SHA-256 hash, so a blob can be mirrored anywhere and still be verifiably the same file.

Add the relay to your client

Damus / Amethyst / Primal (mobile)

1. Open Settings, then Relays.
2. Paste wss://relay.commonshub.dev into the “add relay” field.
3. Confirm, and check it shows as connected.

nostrudel / Coracle / Snort (browser)

1. Go to Settings → Relays.
2. Add wss://relay.commonshub.dev and enable both read and write.

Command line

With nak:

nak req -k 1 -l 10 wss://relay.commonshub.dev

Add the media server

Blossom servers are advertised with a kind:10063 event. Most clients have a field for this under media or upload settings — add https://blossom.commonshub.dev there and your uploads will land here.

Uploads require a signed nostr auth event, so your client will ask you to sign. Current limits:

• Maximum 100 MB per file.
• Images and PDFs kept for a year; audio and video for three months.
• Images, video, audio and PDF only — other types are refused.

Check it is really up

This page and the relay share one hostname. A browser gets the page you are reading; a nostr client asking for application/nostr+json gets the relay’s NIP-11 metadata instead:

curl -H "Accept: application/nostr+json" https://relay.commonshub.dev

That should return JSON containing this relay’s name and supported NIPs. Websocket connections to the same URL reach the relay directly.