Subnostr

I keep seeing the argument that there should be niche or specialized relays for various topics, such as politics, bitcoin, music, etc.

I think this idea goes against the whole point of Nostr. Relays aren't meant to matter or have any influence. Centralizing interests to specific relays will give those relays the power to control a potentially large and influential town hall. The largest politics relay, for example, could start blocking people with certain world views.

Relays are the fabric of Nostr, they need to remain interchangeable and individually irrelevant. The worst thing we can do is find ways to give power and influence to relays.

cloud fodder 2y ago

The same argument could be made for any relay, it gets too big right? Well, that's ok because there is somewhere to go (another relay). And since notes are portable, well, I think your fear might be of old tech..

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Discussion

splinter 2y ago

Notes don't matter if nobody sees them. Relays can't take away your notes but they can certainly curtail your reach if they're large enough, and I fear that specialized relays would augment this issue.

You see it on other Fediverse tech, where certain large instances control the most thriving communities for various topics. I think specialized relays would risk moving us backwards in that direction.

cloud fodder 2y ago

This isn't like mastodon tho. The notes can be streamed and moved at will. Your pubkey is not tied to one instance. If you wanted to provide an alternate relay team and also cover the topic somewhere else, it's easy to just stream from the first relay and have a new relay with a different team. Members can connect to both at once.

At the end of the day, I don't really get Twitter. It seems like a fundamentally broken social paradigm to me. I hope nostr can do better, create more chat use cases, and that's where it's good to have options for relays just like we have options for clients.