totally fair critique!

if in in the future: “in retrospect, decentralized social media was inevitable” then i’d think it would follow a similar bootstrapping history of underdog, freedom focused scaling of other web protocols where initially individual contributors volunteer to help scale the mission and eventually lots of business models solve the relay hosting (ads, subscriptions, pay as you go, brand, etc.)

seemingly, the hardest part is actually not technical scaling but more societal scaling. in that, the initial bootstrapping needs consensus on the societal problem. amazingly, i think that is the “wow” part of nostr where people have awareness of the problem you noted and that scaling a decentralized version is going to be initially challenging until the network effects grow but know that “damn, that would make a difference”