Yesterday, I felt a sudden urge to have my own personal relay for Nostr. My system administration skills are practically zero; even the ancapchan.info site was once built and configured for me without my involvement. But since then, LLMs have appeared, and it would have been a sin not to use them. So, I dug into Grok, and after a few hours of tinkering, the relay relay.ancapchan.info was up and running. This fully revealed the peculiarities of the protocol’s decentralization. For instance, broadcasting a test message only through my single relay turned out to be convenient via the Snort client, syncing relays is convenient via Amethyst on Android, and Nostria knows how to broadcast an arbitrary event as raw JSON, and so on.
The purpose of a personal relay is to store a full archive of my publications, private messages, and everything else, as well as the content of those I follow. This is a good step toward local autonomy, although still far from the ideal I described in the third “Notes on Decentralization”. I still have to figure out backups and content management, and then, perhaps, it will come to providing this relay for use by the local community. And if it proves to be in demand by the community, then it will be, again, a step toward centralization: someone bothers with their own server, and someone uses shared ones—why not.
At this rate, I’ll even properly connect a wallet to Nostr (currently it only works conveniently for receiving), set up a Lightning node, or even start “vibecoding” something…
Readers are also pleasing me with their examples of using neural networks. For instance, one of them opened a resource where they post AI-narrated books for free, including those on libertarianism/Austrian Economics. Of course, a certain amount of cringe remains in AI narration, but it is so much cheaper that it’s a sin not to use it. For those who find it easier to listen than to read, welcome: website, Telegram bot. By the way, the AI narrations of my two books are already there (I’ve already added direct download links to my book pages: Ancap, War).
