Feature request: NIP-45 Event Count about strfry

[hoytech]

This is on my TODO list, I'm hoping to do it for next release. Thanks for making the ticket so I can track this.

Counting is not a problem -- it needs to be able to work with arbitrary queries so I'll just have it run them. The implicit limit can probably be higher than a regular REQ (500) too, since counting is cheaper than actually forming and sending a response.

As you probably know, using this for counting reactions is not necessarily reliable. If you query 2 relays and they both report 100 reactions, then the actual number of reactions could be anywhere between 100 (event sets are identical) or 200 (event sets are entirely disjoint).

[arthurfranca]

Nice!

As you probably know, using this for counting reactions is not necessarily reliable.

Yes. It may not be a big problem if using NIP-65 becomes widespread as clients are supposed to use original event author's read relays to publish reactions. So I would expect these relays to have a good percentage of all reactions to an specific event.

Also I think users don't care much about exact numbers and may just want to know if the event has enough engagement to be considered potentially interesting enough to click on.

[jb55]

looks like nip45 is getting removed nostr-protocol/nips#842

[arthurfranca]

I think (and hope) it won't get removed cause COUNT is useful.

The proposed DVM alternative is a bad idea imo cause it is the same as a client downloading all events of interest just to count them client-side, but it would be the DVM doing it instead of the client.

[hoytech]

Yeah, I saw that. Now I don't know what to do :)

Negentropy is actually somewhat useful for this: You can sync the set of IDs across many relays, without downloading the full events (or even duplicated version of the IDs in many cases). This can actually be useful for a "cross-relay" count. I'm going to write more on this shortly.