but the drama is not about that, it's just about some perception that relays being popular is somehow centralizing

which is ridiculous

and where the money is gonna come from to store the at least tens of gigabytes of storage that every note is currently consuming and the rate at which unique notes are adding to this total - that's never gonna work if someone, ie the users, aren't paying for it

there is something a little bit manipulative and propaganda-like about this drama that fiatjaf has started up and that peter todd who is completely clueless about any better way to run a social network without central control than a publish-subscribe pattern

smells fishy to me, i don't see the problem with small groups of people with common interests congregating around a small set of relays, i think that's the whole damn point of this thing, even if someone is gonna try and say "but that will make it just like mastodon and bluesky" no, because you don't have to run it that way

but someone is gonna have to pay for the traffic, one way or another, and if it's not the users then it's going to be the users data that is being gathered, and that is far worse than merely weak decentralization if you ask me