realization:
nostr cannot scale to its desired scope in its current form. it must change or it will become centralized.
to see it, think about this question:
can every relay store every note across the network?
Discussion
nope
Needs integration with pear runtime to solve the hosting issues in a p2p fashion. Relays should serve as a means to cache content/info when things are initially posted or when peers are limited or unavailable.
Nostr relays and syncthing relays need more in common.
Don't know much about syncthing, but it never seemed to work the way I thought it should & was just a massive let down after bittorrent sync suicided itself. Keet & pear work the way I have always imagined things should work.
It shouldn’t be synching, it should have more in common with syncthing. Meaning, it should have more in common with Secure Scuttlebutt. Meaning, relays don’t store data. Clients do.
And that data is from your network alone, or one hop out. All relays do, is facilitate discovery.
As for pear, I’ll have to discover that myself. Something weird about it…
pear aka hypercore aka dat? the thrice rebranded javascript code? nah im good.
Hypercore & holepunch & other open source modules have been combined to make pear. It already appears to be more scalable than Nostr so it seems to me like Nostr needs Pear more than Pear needs Nostr, & taking the UI from a good Nostr client is probably not as hard as solving Nostr's scaling problems 🤷♂
there was some good discussion around this and there not being a true "global" where everything is stored and current
some of the thoughts that came out of the chats were
- give up on global, there will be relays for certain things and that's ok or it isn't ok
- some centralization will likely happen (like with wine, damus relay) and maybe that's ok if other relays can pop up and quickly replace them should censorship or capture happen
- maybe global can exist but only on shorter durations and you pay for longer storage or you host your own notes if you want history
I still think fiatjaf should have stuck with the secure scuttlebutt model like he initially thought.
making relays only for discovery like syncthing, and having native clients store data on the local machine… with personal networks extending one hop out.
I always imagined smaller relays organized around interests, geography, or the like. when I publish a note I’d choose which relay(s) to send it to. you’ll know where to find my notes from my nip-05 metadata. a million little networks connected by a shared protocol. like the same information structure as a forum like reddit, but decentralized and permission-less at the protocol level.
but it seems in practice we just want send every note to every relay. eventually only a handful will exist. and every damn piece of the infrastructure will be written in javascript by a small group of devs.
I'm new to nostr and relays. Is setting one up hard? I host web servers. I can't imagine it's much different. Any resources you can recommend to set one up? Can it be made easy for plebs?