Oddbean

I think it’s important to analyze the questions. For an ecosystem to be successful, it has to be both technically sound and sufficiently incentivized, either economically or ethically. In my opinion based on what I’ve seen and analyzed, Nostr relays will likely continue to be well-incentivized. But I don’t fault people from exploring the questions as they seek to understand the protocol and potentially build a conviction about it. Instead I would only criticize those that start out with a negative conclusion before they explore the facts, and think in perpetually Malthusian ways about its prospects. The fact that the protocol has bootstrapped to this significant degree for this significant duration, is already a rather positive sign. Too many people theorycraft rather than just observe what works, observe what fails, and keep iterating. Lean into what works. And so far, Nostr works. nostr:note1u9kdxhaclm3m9e2rrnuc2lheudsha3c2f8vwhqvt46hqa5xn8jyq0nr478

It’s easy to get caught up in overthinking things, but the fact that Nostr is still going strong says a lot. Sometimes you just have to let things play out and focus on what’s actually working instead of getting stuck in the “what ifs.” The proof is in the pudding, right?

There are big ones and small ones. The big ones are generally run by a business to better serve a client that they operate. I would happily pay them for premium performance. Not all would, but many frequent users would. Small ones are sometimes just run by people that like to host their own data and some other data. Because they like Nostr.

Why do you say that the relays are well incentivized? Aren’t all the current major relays subsidized? It seems that nostr works because Jack and others are essentially bearing the cost. There are artificial subsidies here. We also need to acknowledge that the client architecture is pushing the community to have fewer very large nodes. Not a good trend. The first step to fix a problem seems to be to acknowledge it. Then people can brainstorm solutions. Not sure motivational “nothing to see here” posts are helpful, even if well intentioned.

It’s not good. We want decentralization so that nostr is censorship resistant. It’s better to have many smaller nodes. The issue is that the clients don’t work well with a large number of small nodes. For example, Damus recommends 10 or fewer. If you can only connect to a limited number of nodes, then you will choose the largest ones so that you can maximize your reach. If everyone chooses the largest nodes, then we have increasing centralization… which isn’t good.

Also on this, people won't want to their previous content pruned. Using the ole twatter as an example, a lot of people relish in conversations they've had with people, revert back to them for future discussions, etc. Or imagine a nostr version of Facebook or Instagram where pictures self-destruct. If that is their expected behavior for a social media service, do you think they are going to accept that note where they ratioed and drug Mark Cuban to be gone forever? Or do you think Grandma Bettie is going to be cool with photo albums of her grandkids just disappearing. We keep seeing that they want mainstream usage or adoption but these are some basic ass user expectations.

Bingo. It's not like we also haven't seen relay/app owners talk about how they need money to continue multiple times already. This without any level of significant adoption, too. What happens to operation cost if Nostr gets to 500 million users like Odell believes is coming? They're going to be orders of magnitude higher unless we have infinitely more nodes somehow balancing data volume and traffic out.