MALICIOUS RELAYS?: I'd like to hear more about these "malicious" relays. Aren't clients hardened against badly behaving relays? If people want to hide their IP address there are means to do that (VPN, Tor). Anyhow, I implemented user-approval for the paranoid so each connection/auth is manually approved (once or always, and modifiyable later). Also gossip has always let users set rank=0 to disable a relay they don't want to use.

Connections are cheap except for SSL. SSL setup/teardown has a cost. If the same number of the same events come from one connection or 10 connections, the 10 connects is more expensive because of 10x SSL.

The gossip model is a major rework, I'm not suprised that it takes time. And I think your work on performance and efficiency is excellent, I designed chorus relay with some of the same ideas that nostrdb uses. I really want to see how fast Damus can go under the gossip model. I expect it will turn out to be highly performant once it's coded efficiently, and all the fear about too many connections will be proven wrong. OTOH if it goes the other way, then we have a very big problem on our hands. But without hard evidence we can yell at each other and never know which way we ought to all be going.

At the same time, I keep finding fundamental bugs in gossip which mean notes are not showing up, even this late in the game. Nostr protocol is designed to be simple, but is suprisingly hard to get right.