another difficulty for nostr:

some important people use social networks not for informational or social reasons, but as a marketing tool to advertise their works, talks, events, art, books, theatrical pieces.

For these people, engagement statistics are very important: it is not worthy their time if they have not engagement, and they will never know if there are no reliable statistics due to the descentralized nature of nostr - besides the fact that people can follow them without even having a "user" (key pair) which could be counted.

And those people tend to carry a lot of folowers with them.

I have seen a couple of them, with tens of thousands followers on twitter, come here, try posting for some time, and then giving up and going back on twitter/insta/FB only.

I think clients and relays should collect as much statistics as it is possible, even partial ones, or even if they are not calculated in "real time". At least as an optional feature.

e.g: could a relay count the number of times my events are fetched by some client? Even if I never have counts from all possible relays which might have copied my event, at least I would have some approximate idea.