NIP-45

Event Counts

draft optional author:staab

Relays may support the verb COUNT, which provides a mechanism for obtaining event counts.

Motivation

Some queries a client may want to execute against connected relays are prohibitively expensive, for example, in order to retrieve follower counts for a given pubkey, a client must query all kind-3 events referring to a given pubkey only to count them. The result may be cached, either by a client or by a separate indexing server as an alternative, but both options erode the decentralization of the network by creating a second-layer protocol on top of Nostr.

Filters and return values

This NIP defines the verb COUNT, which accepts a subscription id and filters as specified in NIP 01 for the verb REQ. Multiple filters are OR'd together and aggregated into a single count result.

["COUNT", <subscription_id>, <filters JSON>...]

Counts are returned using a COUNT response in the form {"count": <integer>}. Relays may use probabilistic counts to reduce compute requirements. In case a relay uses probabilistic counts, it MAY indicate it in the response with approximate key i.e. {"count": <integer>, "approximate": <true|false>}.

["COUNT", <subscription_id>, {"count": <integer>}]

Examples:

# Followers count
["COUNT", <subscription_id>, {"kinds": [3], "#p": [<pubkey>]}]
["COUNT", <subscription_id>, {"count": 238}]

# Count posts and reactions
["COUNT", <subscription_id>, {"kinds": [1, 7], "authors": [<pubkey>]}]
["COUNT", <subscription_id>, {"count": 5}]

# Count posts approximately
["COUNT", <subscription_id>, {"kinds": [1]}]
["COUNT", <subscription_id>, {"count": 93412452, "approximate": true}]