brugeman on Nostr: I would say clients are motivated to connect to 3-4 relays for ...
I would say clients are motivated to connect to 3-4 relays for censorship-resistance/redundancy, but no more - to save bandwidth. They're also motivated to leave slow/expensive relays and join fast/cheap. Early users might choose clients that sacrifice performance for decentralization, but mass users won't. This seems to push relays to centralization - to aggregate events from all other relays and to build bigger better infrastructure to serve more clients. This is a scenario Nostr is trying to avoid, otherwise we could just use Twitter. But I think there is no NIP which fights this at the moment, like a block size limit in Bitcoin. Unless we come up with a clever way to integrate thousands of small relays into one network without sacrificing client performance, we are destined to have a centralized Nostr-Twitter and many small nostr-communities. Am I missing something?
Published at
2022-12-31 08:29:23Event JSON
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"content": "I would say clients are motivated to connect to 3-4 relays for censorship-resistance/redundancy, but no more - to save bandwidth. They're also motivated to leave slow/expensive relays and join fast/cheap. Early users might choose clients that sacrifice performance for decentralization, but mass users won't. This seems to push relays to centralization - to aggregate events from all other relays and to build bigger better infrastructure to serve more clients. This is a scenario Nostr is trying to avoid, otherwise we could just use Twitter. But I think there is no NIP which fights this at the moment, like a block size limit in Bitcoin. Unless we come up with a clever way to integrate thousands of small relays into one network without sacrificing client performance, we are destined to have a centralized Nostr-Twitter and many small nostr-communities. Am I missing something?",
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