Oddbean new post about login | logout FUD around relays being hard to run is dumb, especially those with limited membership. we’re talking about storing and serving small json objects over http. give me a break.
it could even be made as simple as running a Gitea instance which is a single binary, and a /etc/*.conf
I don’t understand what is the alternative. Mega relays? Naturally nostr will head to smaller relays for private groups, and it will be more decentralized this way.
the alternative is mega relays run by providers like the OP or VC funds. change my mind.
nope, what will end up happening is clients run relays for their users to provide them an easy onboarding platform, hobbyists will run their own, communities if big enough will run their own for data availability guarantees, the censored will run their own, so on relays will exist to meet demands
this is the future I am advocating. relays are a commodity. but to get there we need clients to reimagine ux such that it’s clear you’re read/writing to a specific relay e.g. subreddit. this is what will is talking about.
relays will not be communities communities will instead have a need for relays so they can preserve their content for future access, not “isolate” their content many communities will run without a dedicated relay and many relays will exist serving multiple communities, or none
this is just false. Purple community will literally be a relay and we will build ui support for this so that anyone else can run a community this way. In the purple case it will be public read and private write, but making relays first class in app (only show posts from a single relay when you click on it) is the most important thing to make this work. Some people try to do this already but treating relays like a commodity and spreading the same note everywhere is killing this use case.
> relays will not be communities says who? strongly disagree.
If there is a community that wants to be on nostr of the community can get resources to run their specialized relay. Its not about making ALL relays more isolated, but about fine grained control over who you allow in your relay. We shouldn't be looking to create a single town square, but smaller ones with cohesive values. nostr:nevent1qqsr8w954se2j598vujfhcs5fpnwew276yjpglxz235vvjslt7t00nqpr3mhxue69uhkummnw3ezucnfw33k76twv4ezuum0vd5kzmqzyrwye5yxe47wtvvr9t05lhgjzy5f3qxjcl3ft09su6zvqxkwua7qvqcyqqqqqqgvtg6sl
because there will exist relays to serve anyone, some to serve a client’s users, some paid, so on people will not want to spin up a relay for a small community, and would rather use infra they pay for one reason reddit wins imo because it is way simpler to spin up a community, you do not need hosting expertise, you do not need to pay for expensive relay hosting (there’s a reason web hosts share one mysql deployment across multiple tenants)
honestly the protests against what Will is going to do reek of unstated ulterior motives to me. They’re too weird otherwise.
This is mainly a defense against large data leaks like the discord one, if we want stronger protections against cloud spying then we would want something like at rest encryption for nostr notes, which is an implementation detail
The Discord one was not a data leak It was people complaining about how their groups got scraped when they had the join link public. Same thing can happen to Nostr
Groups should be encrypted either way except if they are public.
Decentralization isn’t easy to quantify: in reality the model of per community relays, and having medium sized relays are more similar than people think Relays will exist. There will be less relays than communities. And there will still be lots of relays. Nostr works because of data portability, not because of relay count