No way normies will sign up and pick topical relays, curate their feeds with topical relays and decide which relays to broadcast notes based on the topic.
That is just terrible UX and I don't see a way around it. But that's just my opinion.
Discussion
With the current clients, probably.
Think of a relay as a forum you have to join to read and participate. You move inside a subarea of your Nostr landscape; after you enter, the interaction is basically the same.
But this sort of UI will emerge only when there are real topical relays to explore. It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem now.
It's much easier and more scalable to add topic metadata to events and use homogeneous relays. Why overcomplicate it?
Topical relays can be private, moderated or undergo to some specific rules (e.g. language).
And sometimes you preferred the convenience of easy reachability, losing the decentralized part.
It would be the relays doing the curation though. Which makes all the difference.
meanwhile, discord...
Except those are not actually different "servers". They are in fact topical communities, much like reddit.
yes anything DEV thinking from their point of view will only attract 1% users rest 99er will not arrive or prefer bigtech easyfeed