"run your own relay" yes- you are making my point.

It's the same as hosting my blog, my own YT etc. It's the only way to be self-sovereign, but with no reach and unlikely to be discovered.

We had open protocols before to access dispersed self-sovereign notes and blogs (RSS), yet it failed to catch on and people gravitated to the big platforms Medium, Substack etc.

Nostr is also essentially the set of "relevant" central relays which everybody subscribes to to find and be found. We trust them to continue to behave honestly.