Reliable Nostr DMs (Frontend)

Problem

On the nostr-chat page, the DM sidebar could list conversations (kind-4 history existed on relays), but opening a conversation often showed no messages. Sending a DM also often failed to appear in the UI until a full refresh — and sometimes not even then.

Logs from the REST2NOSTR proxy showed:

GET /req/dms-… returning multiple kind-4 events (inbox listing worked)
POST /req/dm-{64-char-pubkey}-… SSE subscriptions finishing immediately after relay NOTICE / close (conversation load failed)

The channel-info URL (kinds:[41]) is not the DM fetch path; it only loads NIP-28 group channel metadata.

Root cause

NIP-01 requires subscription IDs to be at most 64 characters.

The chat page built SSE subscription IDs like:

dm-{64-char-peer-pubkey}-{timestamp}-{random}

That alone is already ~90 characters. The same pattern was used for group chat (group-{channelId}-…). Relays reject overlong REQ subscription IDs, so the SSE stream ended with no events.

Other Nostr pages (profile, user-feeds, global-feeds, likes, follow list) already used short prefixes and were unaffected.

Additionally:

Conversation history depended entirely on SSE onEvent (no GET bootstrap).
selectedChannelIsDm was inferred from profiles[ch], so opening a DM before the profile finished loading could skip the DM subscription path.
Outbound messages were not shown until an SSE echo arrived.

Changes

Short opaque subscription IDs

src/services/nostr-rest-client.js — generateSubId(prefix):

Accepts a short semantic prefix (dm, group, dm-notify, profile, …).
Produces {prefix}-{timestampBase36}-{random} capped under a client-safe length.
Strips accidental embedded 64-char hex (pubkey / event id) if a caller still embeds one.

Chat call sites now use generateSubId('dm') and generateSubId('group') instead of embedding hex IDs.

GET history + live-only SSE

src/services/nostr-queries.js:

getDmMessages(myPub, peerPub) — kind-4 conversation history via GET /req
getChannelMessages(channelId) — kind-42 group history via GET /req

src/components/app-body/nostr-chat/index.js:

On channel select, load history with those helpers.
Decrypt / render, then set loadedMessages.
Open SSE with limit: 0 (and since when history exists) for live updates only.

Chat reliability polish

DM vs group detection uses known DM / group channel membership (not only loaded profiles).
After a successful publish, the outbound message is shown immediately via onMsgRead (optimistic UI).
Subscription cleanup uses a single subscription.close() path (avoids double DELETE / abort noise).

Side effects

Area	Impact
Feeds / profile / likes / follow	Unchanged (already short sub-ids; still GET queries)
Publish (`/event`)	Unchanged
Group chat	Same reliability/efficiency pattern as DMs
REST contract	Unchanged paths and response shapes

REST2NOSTR companion doc: nostr/REST2NOSTR/dev-docs/reliable-subscription-ids.md

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