Oddbean

How the hell you read all that (which includes personal paid relays) and conclude it's centralizing? The international relay is used for reach in case people's client won't follow the outbox model. It's a fall back.

It’s for the reason you wrote this: “1 large public, international relay: nos.lol, nostr.mom, relay.damus.io, etc. “ You seem to be saying that it matters which relays you use. That, if you don’t use large relays, then you will lose visibility and content. If everyone prefers to connect to large relays, then the system will stay centralized and become even more centralized over time. The only way nostr becomes more decentralized is if it DOESNT matter which relays you use. This is architecture which promotes centralization over time: “make sure to choose a large international relay”… This would promote decentralization: “just randomly choose any 10 public relays and you’ll never miss a post and all your followers will receive your content.” Am I missing something? If it doesn’t matter which relays to use (we can choose randomly), then please let me know.

Don't choose random relays. That's not good. There are lots of relays tracking and selling people's data for profit. That's a terrible strategy. Small relays work on amethyst and other outbox model clients, but many clients haven't updated yet, so the large relay helps with reach. Most importantly, you want to use the relays your friends and follows use. That's doesn't need to be a large relay. It just do happens that today, users haven chosen to centralize in large relays.

Do you know what percentage of users right now are connected to the top three relays? My assumption is that it’s more than 90%. If I’m right (>90%) then this gravity will be hard to fight. The large relays will become stronger through network effects. I remember reading that the devs were going to try an inbox / outbox solution where the large relays would be used for addressing. Is that still the plan? I didn’t see any discussion on removing the dependency on the large relays. Did I miss that? Is there a way to remove the client dependency on the large relays?