sure, you can ask "who will run the relays" but at least running a nostr relay is way less involved than running a mastodon instance, which requires rubygems, node.js, at least three background processes, a postgres database, tons of disk space for cached media, and has a maze of configuration and administration options, and constant critical security updates
not even talking about having to handle sometimes really absurd moderation reports (if you have active users), and the whole instance politics bs
i intend to keep the one at x0f.org running for the foreseeable future but sometimes i wonder why i bother
"Who will run the relays?" sounds pretty similar to me as: "who is going to build the roads?"
People innovate and adapt. Most people can't think outside of the box. 😉
My answer to that question is always, "anyone who wants to."
Absolutely, someone will as long as someone wants to, even with mastodon (apparently!) 😀
But my intuition has always been that requiring less complexity and thus simpler hardware/software is better for decentralization, and resilience in general.
(same advocating for a relatively simple PoW algorithm, if it doesn't require Intel's full design expertise to design and build, it ought to be harder to fully capture it)
Another good side of "simple servers, complex clients" in this case is that iteration and experimentation is much easier, not everything has to be coordinated with whoever runs the servers. Seeing this on mastodon where people are still having energetic discussions about "should we support quote-tweets" 6 years after it first came up 😨
Indeed! Complexity is friction for decentralization.
I wondered the same a bit ago and turned it off after learning of Nostr.
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