I agree, but also under this model if I follow 500 people then I'd have to add 500 relays. 40 relays made Nostr incredibly slow for me. What would 500 do?
Discussion
The goal is not for each person to run their own relay, but they must have that possibility. And one relay per person is an exaggeration, but there could be restricted relays with 1000, 10000 people in them. These relays should be able to run on modest hardware if they're not handling traffic from the entire China.
How can I set up a relay? Have any FAQ to share?
This is why clients need to get smarter though. You don't necessarily need to connect to all relays at the same time, in the background a client could be rotating through a list, connecting and disconnecting at different times, and making other decisions on when and what to connect to.
How is https://github.com/BrightonBTC/bija doing it currently?
You don' t have to pull everybody's messages from all 40 (or 500) relays. You can pull them from just N (I use 2 or 3). That way you aren't getting massive duplicates.