Why? I am literally giving them the option to see what each really has, not only the big ones, so that they can start using them. Today nobody knows what the other relays do and that means people only use the top 20 relays or so.
Discussion
My point is that we shouldn’t (need to) be tethering npub identities and communities to relays because that also tends towards centralization.
Suppose that nostr.wine is the go-to relay to discuss about wine. Wine enthusiasts are going to gravitate towards that single relay because we tied a topic into it, so if that relay goes mad with data collection/goes down/whatever, you’re going to shake that community. And convincing people to use alternative wine relays is going to be harder because bootstrapping is complicated.
Silly example, but I think it gets the point across.
Another argument is that we can’t rely on an endless supply of goodwill like we’re doing. Serving media costs money, and if you are not paying a dime for the service eventually one of the following happens:
1. The relay goes down
2. The relay monetizes your metadata
And even if you’re willing to put mouth where your money is:
1. You’re tethering your npub with a specific relay (silly)
2. Payment is cumbersome (i.e. flat fees “punishes” text users over 4k vloggers
Overall, I think nostr is/can be much closer to some p2p protocols such as secure scuttlebutt, than it is to “federated garbage”, so I think we can steal some ideas from them, like I don’t need to sign an agreement upfront with a specific miner + monthly fee just to transact Bitcoin every once in a while.
I don't think we are tethering npubs to relays regardless of what we do here. We are just making users aware of which relays do what, which they will have to learn sooner or later. The app cannot predict what the user wants to see in a relay.