I'm glad I'm not a bot. Seriously though, it's raw physics when you break it down.

I’ve heard a lot of this “in theory nostr will scale horizontally forever” but, having worked in gaming with hundreds of thousands of concurrents this is the equivalent of “in theory if all the cars start moving right when the light turns green then there won’t be a delay for the cars further back”. Yeah in theory that's true.

Put another way, relying on “naturally occurring” load balancing is about as ambitious as doing away with airplane tickets and just having everyone come to the airport to try to board planes like they’re public busses.

Relays will only scale horizontally in mythical-world conditions that will never happen in the actual world. This is a mythical world where everyone and their sister is running a relay (an impossible relay:user ratio), where everyone adds just the right combination of relays so when one is maxed out vertically it falls back to another that isn’t maxed out (and that isn’t everyone else’s fallback), where high-horsepower relays (whatever distributed SQL monsters) just happen to be scattered around to just the very right places, where nothing on nostr requires ultra-low latency (waiting for the straggler relays), where no one single person has a reason to subscribe to events from more than a couple hundred others, and so on.

And that's just the relays, when you get to the blossom servers, CDNs, etc., and then the interplay between the relay side and the media side, it's just blood out of both nostrils.

If you've scaled anything then you can see from a mile away that nostr will not scale. You need centrally-orchestrated load balancing and a hundred other things akin to a human central nervous system.