Nostr Web Client

If people only read from 10 relays under USG control, nostr won't survive that. I have 3,881 relays in my gossip client relay list. Granted most of those are junk. But there are far more than 10 relays. When I advertise my relay list I generally hit about 100-200 relays with it. For sure some of those are in China, Russia, Iran, etc. So this situation isn't close or likely.

Nuh 5mo ago 💬 1

Good to hear, but this sounds like an adhoc gossip network. We don't need to reinvent overlay networks, we know that DHTs scale, gossip doesn't. Gossip only work when you are already cursed with the need to replicate a dataset in full.. for everything else, sharding aka DHTs are the optimal solution.

The 200 relays you reach, are not likely to be the ones I read from, and if it is likely, then it means these relays are under too much stress and they will churn or drop your data soon.

Nostr is good enough for sure, but physics is physics, and the Web needs a DHT or ICANN... these are the choices.

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

Mike Dilger ☑️ 5mo ago

I agree DHTs are the superior solution. The odds that the 200 relays I used do not overlap at all with the ones you search are vanishingly low when we are inspired to use the most popular of relays. Is that a centralizing force? Yes, but a modest one, and what is popular changes ovrer time. Nonetheless it is clearly inferior to the DHT. Which is just one of the (many) reasons I'm working on Mosaic.