Relays

What Are Relays?

Relays are WebSocket servers that form the backbone of the Nostr network. When you publish a post, your client signs the event and sends it to one or more relays. When you open your feed, your client queries those same relays for events matching your subscriptions.

Anyone can run a relay — there is no permission required, no approval process, and no central registry. This is what makes Nostr censorship-resistant: to silence a user across the entire network, every relay they publish to would need to refuse their events simultaneously. In practice, users simply add new relays when one blocks them.

Relays are independent and do not synchronize with each other by default. A post only reaches users whose clients are subscribed to at least one relay where that post was published. Publishing to multiple well-connected relays increases the reach of your content.

Maskr Hub Relay

Maskr routes all Nostr communication through hub.maskr.space — a dedicated relay hub that aggregates events from the wider Nostr network. The hub accepts events across 15+ NIPs and provides full-text search, caching, and low-latency access.

Because the hub bridges content from the broader network, your posts are still discoverable by users on other popular clients (Damus, Snort, Primal). The hub architecture simplifies connection management while maintaining interoperability with the decentralised Nostr ecosystem.

Configuring Relays

You can add, remove, or reorder relays at any time from Settings > Relays. Changes are published as a kind 10002 relay list event (NIP-65) so other clients can discover your preferred relays.

If you are signed in with a NIP-07 browser extension, Maskr will automatically detect any relays configured inside the extension and offer to merge them with your Maskr relay list.

Recommended: Connect to 3–5 relays. Fewer than three reduces redundancy and reach; more than five can slow down event publishing and increase battery and bandwidth usage on mobile.

You can find community-maintained lists of public relays at nostr.watch.

Relay Status

The relay status indicator in the app shows the live connection state:

• Connected — the WebSocket handshake succeeded and the relay is responsive.
• Connecting — Maskr is attempting to open or re-open the connection.
• Disconnected — the relay is unreachable. Maskr retries with exponential backoff.

If a relay becomes unreachable while you are posting, Maskr automatically falls back to the remaining connected relays so your event is still published. You are notified inline if the publish partially failed so you can retry or add an alternative relay.