Nostr Public Relay Directory — Which Relays to Use and Why

A Nostr relay is a public server you connect to over wss:// to publish and read notes. There is no central Nostr server — your client talks to several independent relays at once, which is exactly what makes the network censorship-resistant. This directory answers the practical question every new user hits: which relays should I actually add, and why? It curates notable, established public relays by access model (free, paid, web-of-trust), focus, operator and the relay software they run.

Unlike a live crawler, this is a curated editorial directory: it lists relays by their stable characteristics — who runs them, whether writes are free or paywalled, and what each is good for — not volatile facts like current uptime or price. Relays change and go offline often; for live status use a crawler such as nostr.watch.

How to pick. Resilience comes from spreading your reads and writes across several relays, not trusting one. A sensible starter set: two or three general free relays, one search relay so your posts are discoverable, a profile/outbox relay so others can find your latest relay list, and — if you get spammed — one paid or web-of-trust relay whose paywall keeps bots out. The most sovereign option of all is to run your own; see the relay implementations dataset for the self-hostable software.

Quick answer

A Nostr relay is a public server you connect to over wss:// to publish and read events; Nostr's censorship-resistance comes from clients speaking to MANY independent relays, so no single operator can silence you. This directory curates 25 notable, established public relays by access model (17 free, 7 paid/spam-resistant), focus and the relay software they run — the practical question of "which relays should I add to my client, and why."

There is no single "official" relay — resilience comes from spreading your reads and writes across several. Add 2-4 general free relays (e.g. Damus, nos.lol), a search relay for discovery, a profile/outbox relay so others can find you, and — if spam is a problem — one paid or web-of-trust relay whose paywall keeps bots out. The most sovereign option is to self-host your own; see the relay-implementations dataset.

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Relay	Access	Focus	Operator	Software	Why it matters
wss://relay.damus.io	Free	General	Damus (OpenSats-funded)	strfry	The default bootstrap relay bundled in the Damus iOS client; a canonical general-purpose relay.
wss://nos.lol	Free	General	nos.lol (community)	strfry	Widely-used free strfry relay shipped as a default in many Nostr clients.
wss://relay.primal.net	Free	General	Primal	strfry	Public read/write endpoint in front of Primal's caching service that powers the Primal apps; the relay itself is open (a separate Premium tier and Primal Trust web-of-trust filtering exist).
wss://relay.snort.social	Free	General	Snort (v0l)	memlay	Fast in-memory relay (runs v0l's 'memlay') tied to the Snort web client.
wss://offchain.pub	Free	General	Undisclosed	strfry	General-purpose strfry relay used as a common default/fallback in many clients; shares its operator key with nostr.bitcoiner.social.
wss://nostr.oxtr.dev	Free	General	0xtr	strfry	Long-running free relay run by developer 0xtr (online since Apr 2022); also reachable as a Tor onion service.
wss://nostr-pub.wellorder.net	Free	General	Greg Heartsfield (nostr-rs-relay author)	nostr-rs-relay	Reference relay run by the author of nostr-rs-relay; one of the oldest public relays and a common example endpoint in libraries.
wss://relay.nostr.net	Free	General	nostr.net	strfry	Long-running free general relay (strfry) with Tor onion access and negentropy (NIP-77) sync.
wss://nostr21.com	Paid	General	Undisclosed	strfry	Paid general relay (nominal ~21-sat Lightning admission) in a US West-Coast datacenter; runs strfry and the TREX moderator portal.
wss://nostrue.com	Free	General	Community	strfry	Free general-purpose relay commonly used as a default write relay.
wss://nostr.mom	Free	Spam-resistant	Undisclosed (nos.lol sibling)	strfry	Spam- and nudity-filtered general relay; a stricter, more experimental sibling to nos.lol.
wss://relay.nostr.band	Free	Search/indexer	nostr.band	custom	NIP-50 full-text search relay powering the nostr.band search engine and trending; aggregates events from all known relays with spam filtering and a trust-rank metric.
wss://relay.noswhere.com	Free	Search/indexer	noswhere	custom	NIP-50 search relay with spam-exclusion filtering, query negation and exact-phrase matching (supports NIPs 1/11/50).
wss://purplepag.es	Free	Profiles/outbox	pablof7z	purplepag.es (open-source)	Outbox-model directory storing profile metadata (kind 0), relay lists (kind 10002) and NIP-51 lists; a default profile-discovery relay in many clients.
wss://relay.mostr.pub	Free	Bridge	Mostr bridge project	strfry	Nostr-to-ActivityPub (Mastodon / fediverse) bridge relay; supports negentropy (NIP-77) for bridge sync.
wss://nostr.bitcoiner.social	Free	Bitcoin	bitcoiner.social (community)	strfry	Long-running Bitcoin-focused community relay; runs strfry with negentropy sync and appears in many early Bitcoin default relay lists.
wss://relay.getalby.com/v1	Free	DM/private	Alby	undisclosed	Dedicated Nostr Wallet Connect (NWC / NIP-47) relay: the encrypted messaging layer between Lightning wallets and apps.
wss://relay.0xchat.com	Free	DM/private	0xchat (OpenSats-funded)	strfry	Default inbox relay for the 0xchat encrypted-messaging app; serves NIP-17 gift-wrapped private DMs to minimize metadata leakage.
wss://nostr.wine	Paid	General	nostr.wine	strfry	Large paid-only general relay; the paid membership is itself the spam-resistance model, with NIP-50 search and NIP-42 auth for DM privacy.
wss://filter.nostr.wine	Paid	Spam-resistant	nostr.wine	filter-relay (custom)	Web-of-trust filtered feed (people you follow + their follows) that also broadcasts your events to public relays; requires an active nostr.wine membership. Runs the nostr.wine team's own filter-relay in front of a strfry aggregator.
wss://nostr.land	Paid	General	nostr.land (Semisol)	NFDB	Premium paid aggregator relay (Lightning subscription): spam filtering, follow-list backup, NIP-05 names and a NIP-42-gated gift-wrapped DM inbox.
wss://eden.nostr.land	Paid	General	nostr.land / Nostr Plebs	NFDB	One of the earliest paid relays; a whitelist-gated premium relay in the nostr.land fleet.
wss://atlas.nostr.land	Paid	General	nostr.land / Nostr Plebs	NFDB	Pay-to-be-whitelisted premium relay in the nostr.land fleet (write access requires paying sats to join the whitelist).
wss://relay.nostrplebs.com	Paid	General	Nostr Plebs (Derek Ross)	strfry	Nostr Plebs members' relay: readable by all, writable only by users whose NIP-05 identity is a registered Nostr Plebs handle.
wss://relay.nostr.com.au	Invite-only	General	Nostr.com.au (community)	undisclosed	Whitelisted / registration-gated relay for the Australian Nostr community; Sydney-hosted.

Snapshot: July 2026. Relays change policy and go offline often — for live uptime and NIP support use a live crawler such as nostr.watch. This list is curated for notable, established relays by their stable traits. See also the relay implementations (self-hosting software), the Nostr clients comparison, the NIPs reference, Nostr for Bitcoiners, and the sovereign self-hosting catalog.

Part of D-Central’s Nostr reference set: Nostr for Bitcoiners · clients compared · relay software · NIPs reference · event kinds · key security.

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Last reviewed July 17, 2026.