actually crazy to me the bubble they are in. They probably have never tried damus android or notedeck. Maybe they are afraid their entire stack is pointlessly centralized. The performance is way better than primal and doesn’t need a caching server now thanks to metadata table i just added.
Discussion
to be fair, again, when Primal has relay or caching index issues, i too post memes and jokes about how nostr isn't down, but Primal is down. i see the issue with Primal here. i can also see all of the good that they're doing too.
Sunk cost is a helluva drug
Worst case scenario, a few years from now: "centralized/curating" clients continue to grow in MAU, investment and noise. There are still n or greater appreciators of the purely decentralized nostr vision, with n being far smaller than it could have been were it not for noise/money/attention being lopsided towards the centralizing/curating.
There's probably nothing to be done about this once the balance starts to shift thanks to lopsided investment. The good news is that us n users will get to enjoy our experience forever, centralizers be damned. The bad news is for any future users who may have noticed and joined the n group, had they not been crowded out by (the market's preference for) the alternative.
I'm beginning to get really suspicious of the term "caching". "caching" sits in naive users' heads as a benign performance improvement. And that positive glow is being abused to sneak things past the unsuspecting users.
There have been so many "I had no idea Primal does that..." notes the past few days. If the settings said "Content filtering and note-ordering server [cannot disable]" rather than "caching server", far fewer people would be using that client.
Every person i have ever talked to about primal doesn’t known its centralized.
They get mad when i explain it to users. They just need to make it more clear in the app or fix it so i don’t have to explain it when people ask me all the time
"simply" being able to bypass the caching server would totally solve it (+ some honest explanation in the settings).
"simply" in quotes because I'm sure that would be a large refactor to their networking code. But worth it in my opinion, as the guy not paying the bills ;)
> "Uncheck this box to bypass the caching server and get content directly from the relays set below. Note: the caching server may filter content and order posts at the discretion of the server operator. You may supply your own caching server, use the Primal default, or bypass the feature altogether"
That would clear up user confusion, build trust, and avoid this whole spat we find ourselves participating in.
Think nostr:nprofile1qqsxqn5kuzvex6ssfzpetzcypdrkwts0qjxf3tre8umllex8yqneavspzamhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumn0wd68ytnzv9hxgtcpz9mhxue69uhkummnw3ezuamfdejj7qgewaehxw309ac8yetdd96k6tnswf5k6ctv9ehx2ap0m8qwf0 did it with notprimal
considering that's 70 people working on it, i'd imagine it was quite a refactor
it also is much cheaper! their caching service is not optimized, and they probably use the more enterprisey clouds, so you are looking at a few thousand/mo on caching