I appreciate this post, thank you for taking the time. Obviously, I’m a big fan of proxy relays as a general concept (thats what filter.nostr.wine is) and we will likely offer this type of individual proxy relay as a service eventually. I’m not sure that it leads to decentralization that is much better than us just having say 50 or 100 “big” relays where we can also “move to different ones if they start censoring us”. There will likely be far fewer proxy relay providers than public relays.
I personally use a desktop computer over a starlink interface and I follow about 170 people. Right now I'm connected to 31 relays, which is far fewer connections than this computer can make. So it is working great for me.
But I recognize that younger people tend to only have a smartphone and fewer people use desktop computers. And I recognize some people want to follow thousands of other people. That is a difficult thing to make work well in a direct fashion under the outbox/inbox model.
But it can work indirectly. One solution is using a client proxy (which nostr:npub1jlrs53pkdfjnts29kveljul2sm0actt6n8dxrrzqcersttvcuv3qdjynqn and I speak about briefly on his podcast that will be coming out in a week or so) which is basically an internet server which acts like a client on your behalf on the outside, and presents like a relay on the inside so that your mobile app only needs to make one connection. That can be done right now with zero changes to the NIPs, using the inbox/outbox model, and it solves that mobile phone problem far better than (1) blasting events everywhere, or (2) everybody centralizing on the same relays. Sure, most people won't be running their own client proxy, they will sign up as a customer to a client proxy service. But they can easily move to a different one if the one they are using starts censoring them. And us hacker do-it-yourself types retain the option of running direct.
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Discussion
I don't expect people will spread out over thousands of relays. Things naturally gravitate towards centralization. We don't all use thousands of different web browsers or even thousands of different email providers (anymore)... people learn which ones are the best and people naturally gravitate to and centralize upon those. The same will be true of relays. Most people will use the main group of 40 or so relays (which might even whittle down to 10 or so over time, who knows) that everybody knows work well. And that begs the question "they why bother with the outbox model?" Because the outbox/inbox model allows that 5% of people who want to do their own thing, to roll-their-own, to have custody of their own notes, to be sure they are not being censored, to do so without losing their audience.
I hope the fan-out never gets crazy large. I hope I'm right that most people will naturally tend toward using the same popular relays. But if it does get large, I think proxy solutions are going to be the way to manage it.
I didn't realize filter.nostr.wine was such a thing, or that you were involved with it (so much going on in nostr to keep track of who is doing what).