I remember that some time ago someone asked random people to look into some buried settings page of some app that showed a list of relay URLs with cryptic icons in front of each. Since the random people didn't understand a thing, the general conclusion was that relays should be even more hidden from users, never to see the light of day.
Of course that conclusion came from a confirmation bias. In fact an equally valid conclusion (and, well, the only acceptable conclusion unless you want to discard Nostr as a failed idea completely, in which I wouldn't blame you) is that relays have to be displayed more, not hidden, in some way that allows users to somehow, perhaps slowly, learn about them. More experiments have to be made.
See, for example, this comment: nostr:nevent1qvzqqqqqqypzp89qh469qapddgsrr8qw84xx08y7q34fm3cw3m64c2g9ufq9ydqtqyv8wumn8ghj76twvfhhstnjv4kxz7tn9ekxzmny9uqsuamnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dshsqgxlycuuy25k5zv4u9xqnve7kphf8xge9c7a00hplqcc7d7f3v5jwg7tr9vj
For other stuff, connecting to different relays manually the way Shakespeare implements it is super annoying and cumbersome. I don’t care which relay the data lives on, I just want to see it without clicking a bunch of buttons.
Having to constantly fiddle with relays pretty much seals nostr’s fate to a niche protocol. Luckily, no one can force terrible UX so it won’t meet that fate.
Currently, shakespeare just ignores the whole relay side of Nostr and has this afterthought retarded implementation. It just uses a handfull of popular big relays. Now here are just my assumptions:
It uses those relays in hopes it covers most stuff out there;
It forces you to select between them probably because doing anything else is too complicated. I.e. the point of the relay selection is only there as a 'well it should all be on this relay, but in the offchance it is not, you can try these others as well.
Its terrible. We can give it some slack because the whole vibecoding thing is novel, and getting the AI to create apps that handle various event kinds is innitially more important, but it is only ( the proverbial) half of the story.
You're approaching it from the wrong side. Of course if you frame it like that relays become a burden, my entire note was just to say you should try to frame the fact that relays exist and they're different from each other as a good thing. I don't know what is the best way to solve that, but it has to be solved, you can't just ignore the relays and hide them entirely.
Well, you _can_ do that actually, but if you do it will just mean you're condemning Nostr to be a centralized garbage fake protocol, and at that point why waste your time in it anyway?
I think there are some use cases where you can show them and others where you don’t need to (user can still configure but it’s not in their face) and it avoids being centralized garbage.
