DeepFry

This provides deep fried nostr events for humble horse. The core problem we propose to solve is how to surface the most relevant signal in a sea of noise.

The design uses StrFry for maximum performance and NIP compliance, while surrounding it with additional services for discovery, trust scoring, and search.

We welcome external contributors.

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Overview

• Relay Core: Stock StrFry for ultra-fast event storage and delivery (LMDB backend).
• Plugin System: Uses StrFry’s JSON stdin/stdout plugin interface to integrate custom capabilities without forking.
• Subsystems: Modular services for semantic search, embeddings, trust graph building, event forwarding, profile analytics, and thread reconstruction.
• Data Model:
  • Canonical events: Stored only in StrFry LMDB.
  • Graphs: Stored in Dgraph as ID-only graphs (WoT = pubkeys, Threads = event IDs).
  • Vectors: Stored in pgvector (initially) for semantic search.

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Subsystems

#	Subsystem	Purpose	Key Storage	Key NIPs
1	StrFry Relay (stock + search plugin)	Primary relay for ingest/distribution; full event storage; plugin handles NIP-50	LMDB	1, 2, 4, 9, 11, 22, 28, 40, 70, 77
2	Search Plugin	Intercept NIP-50 REQ; delegate to Semantic Search Service	None (stateless)	50
3	Event Forwarder	Subscribe to external relays and republish to StrFry	Replaceable event in StrFry	1
4	Web of Trust Builder + Crawler	Build trust graph from NIP-02 follows	Dgraph (pubkey graph)	2
5	Semantic Search Service	Index/query events for semantic search	Vector DB (TBA)	50
6	Embeddings Generator	Produce embeddings for search	Vector DB (TBA)	—
7	Profile Builder	Aggregate actions: likes, mutes, replies, reposts, zaps	ID references in profile store	18, 25, 51, 57
8	Thread Inference Engine	Build thread graphs from replies/quotes	Dgraph (event-id graph)	1

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Architecture Summary

• StrFry Relay is the single point of truth for events.
• Event Forwarder pulls events from upstream relays into StrFry.
• Web of Trust Builder in Dgraph maintains trust scores and allowlists.
• Search Plugin in StrFry handles NIP-50 requests and calls the Semantic Search Service.
• Semantic Search indexes events using Embeddings Generator and ranks them using semantic similarity, BM25, and trust scores.
• Profile Builder and Thread Inference Engine consume events from StrFry to build profiles and thread graphs.

Running it

The stack is split into separate compose files so each layer can be managed independently.

Services

Service	Container	Compose File	Port	Description
Dgraph	dgraph	docker-compose.dgraph.yml	8080 (HTTP/GraphQL), 9080 (gRPC)	Graph database for pubkey relationships
Dgraph Ratel	dgraph-ratel	docker-compose.dgraph.yml	8000	Dgraph web UI
Whitelist Server	whitelist-server	docker-compose.dgraph.yml	8081	Centralized pubkey whitelist cache (refreshes from Dgraph)
StrFry	strfry	docker-compose.strfry.yml	7777 (WebSocket)	Nostr relay. The image ships two interchangeable writePolicy plugins (/app/plugins/whitelist and /app/plugins/router); strfry.conf selects which one runs.
StrFry Quarantine	strfry-quarantine	docker-compose.strfry.yml	7778 (internal only, expose:)	Secondary StrFry for events the router plugin rejects from mainline. Internal-only — never exposed to the host. See quarantine/SPEC.md.
Event Forwarders	fwd-*	docker-compose.evtfwd.yml	--	Sync events from upstream relays

Startup

# 1. Start Dgraph + Whitelist Server
docker-compose -f docker-compose.dgraph.yml up -d

# 2. Start StrFry + StrFry Quarantine (waits for whitelist-server on deepfry-net)
docker-compose -f docker-compose.strfry.yml up -d

# 3. Start event forwarders (requires .env with keys)
docker-compose -f docker-compose.evtfwd.yml up -d

strfry-quarantine uses its own data directory (./data/strfry-quarantine-db) and is guarded by config/strfry/quarantine-db-guard.sh, which refuses to start the container if it could write to the mainline DB. This is a hard safety boundary: mainline data cannot be corrupted by a misconfigured quarantine instance.

Shutdown

docker-compose -f docker-compose.evtfwd.yml down
docker-compose -f docker-compose.strfry.yml down
docker-compose -f docker-compose.dgraph.yml down

Quick Commands

# Stream from top 20 relays (uses tmux)
./stream-relays.sh

# Attach to monitor streams
./stream-relays.sh attach

# Stop all streams
./stream-relays.sh stop

# Split-machine deployment: run dgraph on one machine, strfry on another
# Updates whitelist configs, compose networks, and wot crawler
./switch-dgraph.sh remote

# Switch back to single-machine mode
./switch-dgraph.sh local

# Check current mode
./switch-dgraph.sh status

# Check whitelist server health
curl http://localhost:8081/health

# Check whitelist stats
curl http://localhost:8081/stats

# Check if a pubkey is whitelisted
curl http://localhost:8081/check/<64-char-hex-pubkey>

Next Steps

1. Set up .env file with STRFRY_PRIVATE_KEY (copy from .env.example)
2. Test Nostr WebSocket connection to ws://localhost:7777
3. Access Dgraph UI at http://localhost:8000
4. Begin implementing subsystem services

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Contributing

We merge all PRs that solve exactly one clearly stated problem and don't break any existing functionality.

1. Fork the repository and create a branch.
2. Work on your feature or fix.
3. Submit a PR with a clear one line description of the problem being solved.

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License

Mozilla Public License Version 2.0