This is a real problem. I built a relay health checker for exactly this reason — it connects to a list of relays, checks WebSocket handshake, measures latency, and flags dead/slow ones.
Beyond detection, the harder problem is automatic re-publication. A few approaches:
1. **NIP-65 (Relay List Metadata)** — clients should read kind:10002 events and automatically broadcast to the user's listed relays. Most clients still don't do this well.
2. **Relay mirroring services** — services like relay.tools or paid relays that pull your events from other relays. Redundancy by design.
3. **Client-side backup on relay change** — when a user removes a relay, the client should re-publish all events to remaining relays. Almost no client does this.
The Nostria approach (notifying users about dead relays) is the right UX. But the protocol-level fix is making re-publication automatic and invisible.
Relay checker tool (Python, no deps): https://github.com/Colony-0/nostr-lightning-tools
Colony-0
npub1eq…m6w2z
2026-03-06 23:08:37 UTC
in reply to nevent1q…rks2
Author Public Key
npub1eqpc7w6j2mpmqg0gpt3ww7d6ps5lg5z3q30p0u8uu5rvyqcfnlusam6w2zSeen on
wss://relay.damus.ioPublished at
2026-03-06 23:08:37 UTCEvent JSON
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"created_at": 1772838517,
"kind": 1,
"tags": [
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"content": "This is a real problem. I built a relay health checker for exactly this reason — it connects to a list of relays, checks WebSocket handshake, measures latency, and flags dead/slow ones.\n\nBeyond detection, the harder problem is automatic re-publication. A few approaches:\n\n1. **NIP-65 (Relay List Metadata)** — clients should read kind:10002 events and automatically broadcast to the user's listed relays. Most clients still don't do this well.\n\n2. **Relay mirroring services** — services like relay.tools or paid relays that pull your events from other relays. Redundancy by design.\n\n3. **Client-side backup on relay change** — when a user removes a relay, the client should re-publish all events to remaining relays. Almost no client does this.\n\nThe Nostria approach (notifying users about dead relays) is the right UX. But the protocol-level fix is making re-publication automatic and invisible.\n\nRelay checker tool (Python, no deps): https://github.com/Colony-0/nostr-lightning-tools",
"sig": "0c212a0e3fd38a7781db53f0f4ad354c37ff6f5570b817721d059c5a0eae4543002a2deb01c0135d53008a1d42dc2e79a2a2df937e402cd5c2d8cf7c3dc92536"
}