Relays don't depend on any particular cloud infrastructure
Discussion
Yes, nostr relays don’t depend on particular infrastructure. How about complex apps that may use databases, require redundancy, must be performant, need fault tolerance, etc, that want to use nostr protocol and provide edge locations around the world? Where do those run?
Very good or the best solutions for all of that exist as open source. The AWS value-add is convenience.
Yeah, that makes sense. It’s just degrees of friction. I can have my company’s data centers built out in different regions and run my own hardware, middleware and software. It’s just a lot more difficult than someone coming up with a decentralized version of “Amazon” and me using that. Providers would sell excess hardware capacity to users like is done in Akash Network, which is not on bitcoin payment rails. Someone could possible take Akash open source solution, rip out the shitcoinery and use lightning or cashu payments…. Maybe.
Relays ultimately don't scale, reduce privacy and speed. The fediverse has tried this. You will never get enough servers to scale because the barrier to running and using them is too great. P2P solves this by completely removing that barrier and making essentially every app install a server keet.io
Look all of us here get a hard-on for p2p, but the point is that we also realize it just does not work. To quote the innitial post on Nostr by fiatjaf:
"It doesn't rely on any trusted central server, hence it is resilient; it is based on cryptographic keys and signatures, so it is tamperproof; it does not rely on P2P techniques, therefore it works."
Now i don't understand why you would compare a federated system with Nostr, because they are different. I also don't understand what you mean when you effectively say that webservers don't scale, that seems to be a demonstrably false notion.
I don't think you actually understand what the idea behind Nostr/relays is, combined with a remaining fetish for p2p (we get it, we have all been there, and to some extend part of us will always remain there).
Maybe it will click for you one day, maybe not. Have a nice day
Oh PS. Insofar the discussion is about private messaging specifically; everything sucks, there is no sollution, talk to eachother in person.
But P2P does work it works very well, Keet has proven this. P2P is superior than client server
Fiatjaf made assumptions (wrong) based on existing P2P tech, Keet did not exist
Both nostr and federated systems used a client server model. Nostr is a bit more efficient but the limitations of the servers still exist
Webservers don't scale when you look at it from startups and free services like in the fediverse or nostr. Servers cost money, big money when you get lots of users. Providing for them ultimately if you are to scale to WhatsApp involves becoming a megacorp that sells data like meta is, like telegram is. You don't get from signals 70million users to WhatsApps 3500million users without finding at least a few billion dollars per year which comes with many conditions
The fediverse has hit numerous server issues, nostr too, servers get over loaded, go down, censor and ultimately when users hit some level the server pool and utilisation just does not cope. Nostr has mitigated some of these issues by truly decentralizing content but it still has not solved servers
P2P solves servers, BitTorrent proved this, kazaa and Napster proved this, it however is quite different from server client, more difficult in some ways but also more easier. One particular way P2P is difficult is to collect data, monetize it and control it, so from that perspective you might see reasons big corp and tech have rarely gone down this path. So until now never has a really serious well funded effort been made into p2p, but that has now changed. We are literally just months away from having an app that has more features and better UX than WhatsApp that can also go from its current maybe 50k users to 4 billion in literally 1 day if people wanted, all with no extra costs, no downtime, no scaling issues
Keet is truly the first app that looks like it will and can displace bigtech. It is already technically capable to scale there, scale to everyone on the planet using it, it just lacks enough features to get the adoption, but already it has some features better than apps like WhatsApp and telegram
Yes I am a rabib fanboy, but dive into the app and tech, watch every video and read everything on it and see if you are not the same
Why am I saying this on nostr? Because audience matters, nostr is certainly cool, very cool indeed but it hasn't solved servers