> but does not leave the reply message in the relay which Alyssa pulls from
Well, there is the problem. Just don't do that and you won't need centralization.
Discussion
A bit new here, but as I understand it from asking around if someone you don't follow posts in a sub-thread you are not participating in then you won't see the note and common outbox methods may not help with sniffing the relevant relay out, things hitting a math-shaped wall.
With town-square microblogging, most people spend the bulk of their time reading threads by people they don't follow, and with no intent to participate in those threads. I would imagine it'd trigger some people's OCD knowing there might be interesting replies that are invisible to them as they browse through such town-square threads.
Assuming I'm getting that all right, I'm not sure if:
(a) That's a solvable problem with some sort of 'outbox-plus' paradigm
(b) The only way for nostr to get there is old-fashioned third-party crawling and indexing (and associated search-engine-style centralisation risks)
(c) The way forward is to focus on use cases where such a global view is somewhat superfluous, making the question of how to achieve it moot
Love to get your thoughts.
If the model is followed by everyone, then you can find ALL of the replies in the inbox of the author of the note. Every person replying should have put the note there. Inboxes are not private like postal mailboxes... you can look into other people's inboxes. The problem isn't that the model has gaps, it is that nostr is a herd of cats running in different directions and people love doing things differently -- which is also a good thing, but makes for compatibility issues.
Got it, makes much more sense now. Thanks for taking the time to reply.