Er, yes, it was.

I was there, building my first site on a tenner a month shared space with Demon having read "Learn HTML in a Week". I started on Gopher and WAIS and even Telnet.

Centralisation happens because people like it. They get big services at low costs because of economies of scale.

The same thing will happen to relays. I run nostr.naut.social. It's 4000sats, on most of the lists of Paid Relays, it's a UK Relay so all UK Nostrians should join for that paid relay speed. It covers about half it's cloud costs and NONE of my time.

This is fine, we're all exploring, but roll on 3 years and most people are going to be on the very reliable high performing FREE Google Relay because it's FREE and IT WORKS.

Nostr, like everything else built by people, will be what it will be, and that is almost certainly not going to be anything remotely like what the idealists dream of WHERE those dreams clash with human nature.