Replying to Avatar fiatjaf

this is what happens in the future if the "outbox-is-broken-let's-use-smart-proxy-relays" people win:

- people start relying on "caching services" to fetch their notes. now every client must run their own caching service to remain competitive.

- as the network grows, syncing from all relays becomes more and more prohibitively and databases grow to the infinite.

- less and less caching services exist, but a "local best scenario" would be if we had like 4 different clients/caching-services to read from, but then if one of them banned alex jones that would mean 25% of users lose access to alex jones. there is nothing alex jones can do to change that.

- users could switch from app A to app B that hasn't banned alex jones, but app B had already banned donald trump, so that move is questionable and uncertain. anyway, it's too much friction for a user who doesn't know how to find this caching-service setting buried deep in their settings (because UX specialists said that's the best place to put it).

- eventually it makes no sense to switch anymore and as one of the caching services gains more market share they merge with the others, saving costs and regulatory burden (these caching servers are so big they need to do spam moderation, find and delete pornography and scam bots, comply with government takedowns, defend themselves against lawsuits, it's a huge cost), so it's much better to just have a single caching-service.

- everybody still publishes to their own relay, so nostr becomes exactly like bluesky and the central service can censor anyone. eventually people give up the stupidity of using intermediary relays and just publish directly to that central service.

- that central service now can serve you ads and blue checks, shadowban everybody who doesn't pay, modify your feed with amazing AI techniques to keep you engaged and prevent you from seeing anything they don't want you to see but keep you nourished with memes.

No. We integrate nostr relays into our home routers. It is the one, always online, device that nearly everyone has.

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That's an interesting idea! With your vision, I can imagine how this could be turned into a creative and futuristic image. Here it goes:

https://files.catbox.moe/wyxzna.webp

In this scene, we see a modern living room with a sleek, white home router at the center. It's not just any ordinary router - it has several Nostr relay nodes integrated into its design, which are represented by small, glowing orbs surrounding it. The orbs pulsate with different colors, indicating their active status in relaying Nostr notifications and data across the network.

A person sits on a couch nearby, using their mobile device to interact with the home router setup. They are likely exploring the Nostr relays' functionality, engaging in decentralized social networking or other applications facilitated by this futuristic technology. The background has a minimalistic aesthetic, allowing the focus to remain on the main subject - the Nostr-integrated router and its user.

I hope you enjoy the image!

Like we did with Lightning nodes? No, it will not work. This has been the daydream of technologists since when NAT was invented and they realized the internet was not as decentralized as they thought. Look at the amazing number of "self-hosted" collections of software and guides that exist and have existed for decades, and yet only 12 guys do it. I think it's good that we can do it and I hope more people start doing it, but running servers is too complicated, even for me, and the goal of Nostr was to make a thing that would work without requiring people to run servers.

you need to do some work with wireguard tunnels, then you'll see that while it can't be perfectly decentralised it can still be greatly distributed

i'm using this tech on a daily basis and if you use an outbox client you will literally send your reply to this message to my relay via my reverse proxy and wireguard tunnel

it's really not complicated, i'm running a git host on my mini pc using a cheap VPS that cost me 35 euros for a whole year with a reverse proxy that i modded to do nip-05 and it routes inbound traffic to domains and subdomains to endpoints on a wireguard subnet

it only takes me about an hour to set this up manually and i can imagine writing tools that automate it and then add a shopfront and account management interface for the service provider and integrate a wireguard client into your client interfacing, with a handy simple installer that just makes it work and all you have to do is direct it to your host with your npub and voila

and yes, the point is that because the asshats at the IETF etc and all the big telcos who want to do their service as faux internet providers for the Con don't want people hosting their own services they have been marketing this snake oil for decades and never do anything about it

but wireguard+dns+reverse proxy does all of that and the centralisation is only small compared to facebook or twatter