We have a solution if your contacts have a nostr address: you can store your relays in your nip05 metadata. Unfortunately i don’t think many nip05 providers set this up properly from your relay list.
We currently rely on a few large hub relays to store relay lists, but as the network gets bigger a dht might make more sense. Not sure what nostr:npub180cvv07tjdrrgpa0j7j7tmnyl2yr6yr7l8j4s3evf6u64th6gkwsyjh6w6 thinks.
Of course, relying on DNS is a perfect way to scale.. the question is do you want to use ICANN as the root server, or millions of nodes in an overlay network that has been actually winning censorship fights for more than a decade.
Fiatjaf keeps insisting that DHTs don't work regardless of how many proofs I show him. He also would rather make up a bespoke tiny DHT than use Mainline because he thinks breaking compat with secp would kill Nostr.
I can't say it won't.
But if you can support nip5... you can support Pkarr. Or don't I am in this for the system design conversation, more than any desire to change how any existing systems or products work.
I agree that breaking compat with secp would be unnecessary complexity
I think the combination of "well-known" public relay list (kind:10002) directories like purplepag.es + nip05 hints + relay hints in events whenever someone is mentioned in a Nostr event + nprofile/nevent relay hints are enough to allow any client find out where any other public key is publishing to. The world is not so big after all and even on the internet no real person is capable of consuming content from more than a few thousand others at best.
If nostr:npub1jvxvaufrwtwj79s90n79fuxmm9pntk94rd8zwderdvqv4dcclnvs9s7yqz wants to call this a kind of DHT that sucks so be it, to me it makes more sense because it is more flexible and fluid, can be implemented in parts and incrementally, and in the best-case scenario (the one in which you get the relay address from an immediate hint, for example) it is more efficient than any DHT.
I am also not against having a Nostr DHT for this either, as I told him a million times. But the DHT would necessarily be just another method to help in the task of finding a relay list.
