DMs from Amethyst not showing in Primal — even with matching relays

[ghost]

Hey Primal team,

I'm encountering a bug where direct messages (DMs) sent from Amethyst do not appear in the Primal app, even though both clients are using the same relays.

Versions & Environment

• Primal version: 2.2.14 (Play Store)
• Amethyst version: v0.94.3-PLAY (Play Store)
• Device OS: Android 15

Relays configured in both apps

All of these were active (green) and identical in both clients:

• wss://nos.lol
• wss://nostr.bch.ninja
• wss://nostr.bitcoiner.social
• wss://nostr.mom
• wss://nostr.oxtr.dev
• wss://nostr.wine
• wss://nostria.space
• wss://premium.primal.net
• wss://purplepag.es
• wss://relay.damus.io
• wss://relay.nostr.band
• wss://relay.primal.net

Steps to Reproduce

1. In Amethyst, I removed all relays except relay.primal.net to simplify testing.
2. Sent a DM to another user from Amethyst.
3. Verified (using Amethyst’s relay info view) that the DM was sent via relay.primal.net.
4. Opened Primal — the message never appears in the conversation thread.
5. Added back all the usual relays (above) and confirmed they're reachable in Primal.
6. Still, none of the DMs sent from Amethyst appear in the Primal app — regardless of which relay was used.

Additional Notes

• The same conversation thread in Amethyst shows both sent and received messages correctly.
• In Primal, only DMs sent from within Primal appear — none of the externally-sent ones show up.
• Tested with and without Tor/VPN.
• This behavior suggests Primal may be filtering or failing to fetch certain DM events, despite relays delivering them.
• I have also posted about this with the screenshots on Nostr.

This significantly impacts interoperability between clients.

Thanks for looking into it — and thanks for building a great UI/UX! Let me know how I can help debug further.

[ghost]

Update:
I believe I’ve found the root cause of this issue: Amethyst is sending DMs using NIP-17 when the NIP-17 mode (🕵️ icon) is active. These NIP-17 messages are not yet supported by Primal, which explains why they never show up — even though they are successfully published to the relays.

This is confirmed by:

• The in-app popup in Amethyst explaining that NIP-17 is a new format not yet widely implemented.
• Testing DMs with and without the 🕵️ (NIP-17) mode enabled:
  • Without NIP-17: DMs appear in both Amethyst and Primal.
  • With NIP-17: DMs appear in Amethyst only — Primal doesn’t show them at all.

So the issue isn’t relay-related — it’s that Primal currently doesn’t handle NIP-17 encrypted DMs (GiftWrapped / Sealed Direct messages).

Suggested fix:

• If NIP-17 support is on the roadmap, great — would love to know the timeline.
• If not yet planned, perhaps show a warning or stub in the DM view when encountering unsupported formats?

[ghost]

Screenshots sent from Amethyst (in DMs) aren't visible in Primal :/

[AleksandarIlic]

Hey @andy108369! We plan to revisit DMs feature and improve it, but it's not going to be soon. Thanks for the feedback on this topic; I'll share it with the product team.