Oddbean

I think it's different. Most people dont know this, but in the first few years of the web, there was actually a list of ALL the servers. They maintained it for a while. But it kept doubling every 3 months or so. In the end they could not keep track. Nostr is different. It was on a growth spike But then that growth stoped and reveresd. Now the relay is not growing exponentially, or even growing at all. It may be shrinking The two systems are quite different.

The fact that we're observing some volatility doesn't mean it's different in principle. I don't see any difference in incentives. Only difference is initial audience - web was being grown by tech people, and the only way to participate was to host a web server. Nostr is growing with not tech but freedom-loving people for the most parrt, who for now have some free relays serving them. Many tech people do have their own relays here, which aren't good for public use, and they shouldn't be. That's why we have outbox model, so that personal relays could participate. The bigger nostr gets, the more valuable being on nostr becomes, the more relays there will be, run by people with profit motives, for themselves and their following.

I just joined but the obvious thing to me seems to be the extensibility. in old social media you have to ask permission for API access. whereas here itd be much easier for a builder to develop on and thus want to spin up a relay because they can control their product experience better but clearly a lot of UX things to still figure out

Most have given up because they just came to try "running a relay", not "to host my own content for me and my friends". They weren't creators, they were devs. And for creators, tools for relay management and access policies aren't there yet. Running a public relay is hard - spam, costs, etc - I know what it's like with our big one. Running a personal relay that has strict access policies has no such costs. We run two specialized relays that have zero ongoing costs or scaling issues, just 1% CPU of a server we're paying for anyways.

Every phone can be a server. Convince Damus or Primal to build that feature and suddenly you get thousands of servers added for redundancy. There is a big difference, we can self-host and offer our bandwidth to host others.