I think it makes sense for relays to either focus on doing the main relay job of taking and serving everybody's posts and filtering spam, OR to focus on providing INBOX services to users. The latter would accept giftwraps and any other events tagging you, and would probably constrain how much space they should be allowed to take (just like an email provider).
Certainly a relay could offer both, but it might be better for relays to specialize.
What we are missing though are relays specializing in being INBOX (read) relays. Which is why I keep thinking about writing a relay --- but that's nuts right? I mean we have tons of developers writing tons of projects, I shouldn't spread myself so thin. But I'd really love to pass on the tech that I was going to use to build it to some enterprising programmer.
I believe telling users not to use a certain relay because they're not able to send DMs with that relay is setting us up for failure. That said, I do believe in having specialized relays, such as a search relay or a media relay, but eventually we're going to get too granular for most people and it's going to provide a less than optimal or bad experience. How many specialized relays do we need before that number becomes too complicated for most users to use? Nostr is already seen as too technical or too complicated for most. I think we should work on making that experience as smooth as possible for mass adoption.
We are a long way from mass adoption. This is the dirty, scrappy part of building that most people never see because when it’s a company, it us usually happens in stealth mode. We’re doing it all out in the open. It’s probably going to be like this for quite a while. Most of us have been here for less than 9 months.
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