Oddbean new post about login | logout I'm still trying to figure out relays. Is the ultimate goal/solution to just have many more people running their own relays? If so, running relays would need to be A LOT easier, in my opinion.
No, very few people should be running relays. We have probably 10x more relays than we need right now. The point is that if one relay goes down or bans you, you have at least one other relay that can continue to serve all your stuff. This doesn't require self-hosting.
> very few people should be running relays. We have probably 10x more relays than we need right now How does one calculate the optimal number of relays?
That's a great question, I don't know. Maybe it can't be answered, because it's dependent on a whole bunch of social factors, like how likely relay runners are to censor users, or what a given user's risk profile for censorship looks like. In theory, 2 relays for the entire network is enough. But that introduces scaling issues and the possibility for them to cooperate in banning someone. My best guess is that at the network's current size, 5-10 hubs is probably enough, plus relays that support special use cases, like authenticated communities and archival relays. Nerds will run their own relays, which is fine, but it doesn't really benefit anyone as long as censorship or relay failure is only occasional. I guess what's most important is that 1. there are backups of important data, and 2. it's easy to create a new relay when one is needed.
tor provides government resistant backup nostr:note1lrswfs4hncwk30fq75urdlhv4jgy50d97d247tvx7nhcx3r0wd7qf7h0qx
tor provides government resistant backup nostr:note1lrswfs4hncwk30fq75urdlhv4jgy50d97d247tvx7nhcx3r0wd7qf7h0qx
tor provides government resistant backup nostr:note1lrswfs4hncwk30fq75urdlhv4jgy50d97d247tvx7nhcx3r0wd7qf7h0qx
tor provides government resistant backup nostr:note1lrswfs4hncwk30fq75urdlhv4jgy50d97d247tvx7nhcx3r0wd7qf7h0qx
I think a big part of the problem is that tech giants centralised TCP/IP to a point that big hosting companies can easily take part in censorship under the guise of regulatory pressure. Self-hosted relays that are open are what we need - Better yet, nostr-client-intergrated-relays with meek or something of the like. No point in having multiple relays hosted by a singe company - That's still a high degree of centralisation, even if spread around the globe. Can't remember which one it was, but I recall a desktop Nostr app with a built-in relay service, going over a tor tunnel. I have a feeling that's where Lume announced it was headed in the future - And I think that's the right step to go. Nostr on websites is great from an accessibility perspective (hail PWAs I guess), but accessibility and censorship-resistance are not the same thing. I'd say anyone using nostr solely via websites is setting themselves up for trouble, at some point, somewhere, for some reason.
I think you're right that DNS, TLS certificates, and ISPs are all chokepoints. Maybe something like i2p bridges or something could overcome that. But that's not specific to nostr, so we have the help of the broader freedom tech community available to us.