Unpopular prediction.
Nostr scaling will eventually end up looking like mastodon…. Similar trade-offs already determined suitable for mastodon will likely be seen as no brainers for future ideas for Nostr. Change my mind.
Discussion
Why? What’s the benefit of centralizing in a handful of large relays?
As long as we figure out a sustainable model (a matter of time I think) and keep relays dumb, there’s no need to centralize.
Whether we will centralize on few relays is really up to client developers. If most clients still query from relays and don’t treat local storage the primary storage, we will end up centralized. It has nothing to do with smart or dumb a relay is. We will centralize on relay implementations. But operations won’t
It's tricky. I think the future of Nostr will be, to limit what you see.
- There may be millions of relays (sort of like websites)
- You connect only to the relays you care about (RSS), and filter the content (and users) you see
I think the real problem may be discoverability without centralization, but this is already a problem of today's web.
You’re here now :)