while this mentality of a "global nostr feed" persists people are not going to understand what this protocol is about
what this chart shows, if you ask me, is people moving away from public open relays to private, closed ones that these stats cannot acquire data from
nostr is PRIVATE, it cannot function as a purely public network
the reason is that spam cannot be controlled without gating access to publishing events and replyguy and replygirl have made certain that everyone is driven off the big relays and the incumbent user population, which was somewhere between 10-20k is now mostly not publishing to those relays, and thus it appears they no longer exist
if there was someone who was paying to access those private and WoT relays data sets (which i doubt is happening yet) and propagating those events out to the main public relays, then ok
i have an inkling that something like this has been happening here and there but not very much, i constantly see some IP address repeatedly bouncing my events back to my relay, which i can only speculate is because i'm publishing it to one of the paid relays (probably nostr.wine, could be nostr.land) and they are subs on those relays and they have a bouncer set up that is rebroadcasting events
i thought maybe it could be just a client bouncing the event but i don't think so, because it happens continuously, like, every time i make a note or react i see the event again from this same IP address like it's a network service
