Introduction

What is Huddlers? And what is it for?

A tool for Nostr developers

Huddlers is a tool that dramatically simplifies the process of building high-performance Nostr apps.

Huddlers provides server-side implementations for crucial tasks that are required for any Nostr application:

  1. Collecting and organizing a user's feed

  2. Fetching the profiles of the authors of Nostr posts

  3. Assembling Nostr posts from multiple relays

  4. Identifying users' most recent profiles and follow lists

Dive In!

  • The User Posts and the Feed Fetcher pages on Huddlers.dev use the API to fetch and render events with dramatically low latency.

  • Check out the examples at the end of each feature page.

  • Try out one of the Huddlers SDKs in your Nostr client.

Why are many Nostr apps slow?

Nostr-based applications need to retrieve data from multiple relays. However, many relays are slow, and most relays cannot accomodate too many requests at any given moment.

As a result, Nostr apps often take too long to load data and offer an unpleasant user experience compared to sites such as Twitter or Instragram.

How can you build fast Nostr apps?

If you want to build a Nostr app that is fast and responsive, you would need to do the following:

  1. Setup a dedicated relay or server that identifies frequently requested events.

  2. Use this server to collect and cache Nostr events.

  3. Make these events readily and exclusively available for your client app.

How does Huddlers help?

Huddlers is a caching service for Nostr that any developer can use in their client apps.

  • The Huddlers API handles the Fetching of events to your client. A client only needs a relay connection for Posting events.

  • The Huddlers server handles the selective caching of events for faster fetching.

Huddlers is NOT a Relay.

It is important to note that Huddlers is not a relay. It is a server used for outsourcing a lot of the resource-intensive tasks that need to be handled on the client side.

Huddlers is like a specialized client.

Goals

The ultimate goal of Huddlers is to allow developers to launch fast and performant Nostr apps without needing a dedicated backend. I want to:

  • Make it super cheap and easy to build clients.

  • Handle complex and time-intensive tasks for which client developers are currently re-inventing the wheel.

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