Commons Hub Brussels

A nostr relay for the commons

Welcome. This is the relay of the Commons Hub community at Rue de la Madeleine 51, Brussels. Anyone can read from it; members can write to it. Here is how to use it.

What is this?

Nostr is a protocol for social apps where your identity is a keypair you own, not an account on someone's server. Relays are the dumb pipes: they store signed notes and hand them to whoever asks. Running our own means the community's conversation does not live or die with a company, and events published here are what commonshub.brussels and its tools read from.

Who can write

Reads are open to everyone. Writes are limited to community members: the relay only accepts events signed by keys on its allowlist, which follows Commons Hub membership. If your client says the relay rejected your note, your key is not on the list yet.

• Become a member or link your nostr key to your membership at commonshub.brussels.
• Stewards can add or remove keys from the allowlist (over the Commons Hub Tailscale network at /whitelist).
• Questions: hello@commonshub.brussels or ask in the Commons Hub Discord.

Add the relay to your client

Damus / Amethyst / Primal (mobile)

1. Open Settings, then Relays.
2. Paste wss://relay.commonshub.brussels 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.brussels. Enable read; enable write if you are a member.

Command line

With nak:

# last 10 notes
nak req -k 1 -l 10 wss://relay.commonshub.brussels

# everything from one author
nak req -a npub1… wss://relay.commonshub.brussels

# publish (only works for allowlisted keys)
nak event -c "hello from the commons" wss://relay.commonshub.brussels

From code

const ws = new WebSocket("wss://relay.commonshub.brussels");
ws.onopen = () => ws.send(JSON.stringify(["REQ", "sub1", { kinds: [1], limit: 20 }]));
ws.onmessage = (m) => console.log(JSON.parse(m.data));

Limits

• Max event size 64 KB, max 200 subscriptions per connection, max 500 events per filter.
• Events older than three years or more than 15 minutes in the future are rejected.
• NIP-42 authentication is supported. Supported NIPs are listed in the relay information document below.

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, and websocket connections reach the relay directly:

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