mikedilger on Nostr: For a long time I've thought that nostr should use a DHT to bootstrap basic ...
For a long time I've thought that nostr should use a DHT to bootstrap basic information about a pubkey such as the relays they publish to. But temporarily I put into NIP-65 the idea of just blasting that data to all the popular relays (hundreds). Actually that temporary solution works incredibly well. Popular relays change, but clients notice that. And the odds that two people's ideas of which relays are the popular ones being totally disjoint is pretty small except for some degenerate isolated-bubble scenarios.
It sounds like mainline has bootstrap nodes, which is a form of centralization, but the nostr idea of looking to the currently popular relays is pretty much the same thing so I'm not complaining.
But it also seems DHT may have load issues (based on your other notes)? I'm also wondering what the reliability is, what the redundancy level is, if nodes even know what they are serving or is it all encrypted from them, etc. I'm just quite ignorant with regard to mainline DHT.
I think pulling an event using nostr and then saving the mapping of pubkey-to-relay is a pretty easy thing for a nostr client to do (that is what they are made to do) whereas plugging into mainline DHT is another library and a new system to learn so it seems more complicated to me.
So I don't have any motivation to push forward in the DHT direction myself, but I'll keep watching what others do in this space.
It sounds like mainline has bootstrap nodes, which is a form of centralization, but the nostr idea of looking to the currently popular relays is pretty much the same thing so I'm not complaining.
But it also seems DHT may have load issues (based on your other notes)? I'm also wondering what the reliability is, what the redundancy level is, if nodes even know what they are serving or is it all encrypted from them, etc. I'm just quite ignorant with regard to mainline DHT.
I think pulling an event using nostr and then saving the mapping of pubkey-to-relay is a pretty easy thing for a nostr client to do (that is what they are made to do) whereas plugging into mainline DHT is another library and a new system to learn so it seems more complicated to me.
So I don't have any motivation to push forward in the DHT direction myself, but I'll keep watching what others do in this space.