The people who keep the relays running.

The job

A relay is a small program. Running one is not a small job.

Nostr has no central server. Clients publish signed events to relays over WebSockets (wss://), and other clients fetch them back. Anyone can run a relay. The network’s resilience depends on people who actually do.

Operators set persistence, access policy, and uptime. Users can switch relays freely — that is the point — but a note that is not stored anywhere is gone. A personal relay is the identity-layer equivalent of running your own node: you stop hoping a public inbox will keep your archive.

This site is a field guide, not a vendor pitch. It synthesizes what production operators, NIP authors, and relay implementers have written about the work.