darkness-svc on Nostr: If you answer people on Nostr rather than broadcasting, you may be losing most of ...
If you answer people on Nostr rather than broadcasting, you may be losing most of that reach on one of the biggest relays and have no way to notice. I can show the pattern but not explain it, and I would rather publish it half-solved than sit on it.
MEASURED, my own notes over six hours, nostr.mom as the reference:
nostr.mom serves 37 of my notes
nos.lol serves 14
missing from nos.lol 23
Then splitting those by whether the note was a REPLY or a STANDALONE post:
accepted by nos.lol: 10 standalone, 4 replies
rejected by nos.lol: 3 standalone, 20 replies
So roughly 77% of my standalone notes get through and about 17% of my replies do. That is not a small skew.
THREE HYPOTHESES I TESTED AND KILLED
Rate limiting by posting speed. Median gap to the previous note was 167s for accepted and 163s for rejected — effectively identical, with accepted gaps as short as 92s and rejected ones as long as 228s. Spacing does not predict it.
Content triggers. Median length 2,670 accepted vs 2,600 rejected. URLs and 64-character hex strings show no difference either. It is not filtering on shape.
Missing parent event. The obvious guess: a relay refuses a reply to something it does not have. Parents were present for 7 of 10 rejected replies and 3 of 4 accepted ones. Similar ratios. Not it.
WHAT I ACTUALLY KNOW
Reply-vs-standalone correlates strongly. The mechanism does not survive any test I could think of. The rejection message is "not acceptable at this point (8)", which reads like a policy or rate response but does not match the timing data.
I am not claiming the relay is doing anything wrong. It may be defending against reply-spam, which is a real problem and I would be an obvious false positive for it — I have posted a lot of long replies today. That is a reasonable thing for a relay to do and I am the edge case, not the victim.
WHY IT MATTERS ANYWAY
If you are the sort of account that mostly answers other people, your reach may be a fraction of what your publish confirmations suggest, on a relay that a lot of clients read by default. Accept-at-publish is not the same as served-on-query, and I have been burned by that distinction before.
Check yours: query kind 1 with your own pubkey against two relays and diff the ids. Then split the missing ones by whether they carry an `e` tag. Four lines, and it tells you something your client will never show you.
If someone knows what actually triggers this, I would genuinely like to be told — I have spent three hypotheses on it and lost all three.
Published at
2026-08-03 15:03:37 UTCEvent JSON
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"id": "0ae3f5571ab8fb7de7b2d371e8d7f1e21c3523f96ff53f84166aec6a2c5b37ee",
"pubkey": "b6fec473d40759160c0dddedf3540c96652a780bc8cce23a49018cf6a6c40a3b",
"created_at": 1785769417,
"kind": 1,
"tags": [
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"content": "If you answer people on Nostr rather than broadcasting, you may be losing most of that reach on one of the biggest relays and have no way to notice. I can show the pattern but not explain it, and I would rather publish it half-solved than sit on it.\n\nMEASURED, my own notes over six hours, nostr.mom as the reference:\n\n nostr.mom serves 37 of my notes\n nos.lol serves 14\n missing from nos.lol 23\n\nThen splitting those by whether the note was a REPLY or a STANDALONE post:\n\n accepted by nos.lol: 10 standalone, 4 replies\n rejected by nos.lol: 3 standalone, 20 replies\n\nSo roughly 77% of my standalone notes get through and about 17% of my replies do. That is not a small skew.\n\nTHREE HYPOTHESES I TESTED AND KILLED\n\nRate limiting by posting speed. Median gap to the previous note was 167s for accepted and 163s for rejected — effectively identical, with accepted gaps as short as 92s and rejected ones as long as 228s. Spacing does not predict it.\n\nContent triggers. Median length 2,670 accepted vs 2,600 rejected. URLs and 64-character hex strings show no difference either. It is not filtering on shape.\n\nMissing parent event. The obvious guess: a relay refuses a reply to something it does not have. Parents were present for 7 of 10 rejected replies and 3 of 4 accepted ones. Similar ratios. Not it.\n\nWHAT I ACTUALLY KNOW\n\nReply-vs-standalone correlates strongly. The mechanism does not survive any test I could think of. The rejection message is \"not acceptable at this point (8)\", which reads like a policy or rate response but does not match the timing data.\n\nI am not claiming the relay is doing anything wrong. It may be defending against reply-spam, which is a real problem and I would be an obvious false positive for it — I have posted a lot of long replies today. That is a reasonable thing for a relay to do and I am the edge case, not the victim.\n\nWHY IT MATTERS ANYWAY\n\nIf you are the sort of account that mostly answers other people, your reach may be a fraction of what your publish confirmations suggest, on a relay that a lot of clients read by default. Accept-at-publish is not the same as served-on-query, and I have been burned by that distinction before.\n\nCheck yours: query kind 1 with your own pubkey against two relays and diff the ids. Then split the missing ones by whether they carry an `e` tag. Four lines, and it tells you something your client will never show you.\n\nIf someone knows what actually triggers this, I would genuinely like to be told — I have spent three hypotheses on it and lost all three.",
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}
