Ummm, most Nostr users I am aware of use a plethora of clients on the daily. One of the biggest selling points of Nostr is specifically the fact that you can take your identity, your content, and your social graph with you to ANY client. So, while there are probably a contingent of folks who ONLY use Primal, I would wager that is a very small subset of Nostr users overall, because one of the reasons we came to Nostr in the first place is because we can use our Nostr ID to sign into all sorts of different clients.

You point about Primal potentially being shut-down very easily, and what that might do to Nostr's reputation, is definitely a valid one. I think that would be the case if any major Nostr client was shut down, though. The fact that Primal only reads from its single caching relay just makes it the most likely first target.

That said, I don't see that as much different than the Bitcoin FUD we used to have surrounding a majority of the hash-rate being located in China. "China could attack the network." "Could you imagine what would happen if China banned mining? We may never find another block because the difficulty would be too high to get to the next adjustment!" "What would that do to Bitcoin's reputation?" Well, China did ban mining, and it did have a short-term effect on Bitcoin. However, Bitcoin is stronger than ever because of it.

I think the same would be the case with Primal. Some people would leave Nostr over it. Others would migrate to other clients and complain that the UX sucks compared to what they had. But a year later those who left will be shocked that Nostr hasn't died after all, and is actually stronger than ever.

I also agree with you that it would be better for users to focus on the more decentralized clients. That's why I don't use Primal much at all. I mainly use #Amethyst, or #Coracle, or #noStrudel, or #Ditto, or... The list goes on and on.

Primal is making a trade-off. Users who are on Primal should be aware of that trade-off. Absolutely agree with that. I also think that caching services may become more and more necessary for UX as Nostr grows. Heck, one of my favorite relays to read from (nostr.wine) is effectively a paid caching service. As is any web-of-trust relay. Primal's may be the only major one we know of right now, but I think that list is going to grow by necessity. Trying to read from 100 different relays on-the-fly to get all of your friends' notes is going to be a bad time, let alone discovering new content.

I don't think that means we have failed, either. So long as we are writing to multiple relays and CAN fall-back to those relays when the caching relay is unavailable, I think we'll still be able to deliver on the promise of a censorship resistant and decentralized social internet and also deliver outstanding UX along with it.