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techfeudalist | 2 months ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag +8 
 Why do you say that the relays are well incentivized? Aren’t all the current major relays subsidized? It seems that nostr works because Jack and others are essentially bearing the cost. There are artificial subsidies here. 

We also need to acknowledge that the client architecture is pushing the community to have fewer very large nodes. Not a good trend. 

The first step to fix a problem seems to be to acknowledge it. Then people can brainstorm solutions. Not sure motivational “nothing to see here” posts are helpful, even if well intentioned.
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Cloudymindxii | 2 months ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 Why do you believe it’s good to have very large nodes?
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techfeudalist | 2 months ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag +5 
 It’s not good. We want decentralization so that nostr is censorship resistant. It’s better to have many smaller nodes. 

The issue is that the clients don’t work well with a large number of small nodes. For example, Damus recommends 10 or fewer. 

If you can only connect to a limited number of nodes, then you will choose the largest ones so that you can maximize your reach. 

If everyone chooses the largest nodes, then we have increasing centralization… which isn’t good.
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Svoboda | 2 months ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag +1 
 Also on this, people won't want to their previous content pruned. Using the ole twatter as an example, a lot of people relish in conversations they've had with people, revert back to them for future discussions, etc. Or imagine a nostr version of Facebook or Instagram where pictures self-destruct. 

If that is their expected behavior for a social media service, do you think they are going to accept that note where they ratioed and drug Mark Cuban to be gone forever? Or do you think Grandma Bettie is going to be cool with photo albums of her grandkids just disappearing. 

We keep seeing that they want mainstream usage or adoption but these are some basic ass user expectations.
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Cloudymindxii | 2 months ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 I misunderstood and thought you wanted very large nodes and not a large number of smaller nodes
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Svoboda | 2 months ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 Bingo. It's not like we also haven't seen relay/app owners talk about how they need money to continue multiple times already. This without any level of significant adoption, too. 

What happens to operation cost if Nostr gets to 500 million users like Odell believes is coming? They're going to be orders of magnitude higher unless we have infinitely more nodes somehow balancing data volume and traffic out.