Subnostr

Mazin from nostr.wine wrote this convincing article where he says having gazillions of connections is not a good idea.

https://habla.news/u/mazinkhoury.com/1710959004510

I agree. This huge # of connection requirements won't work. Especially on mobile. If we were RSS syncs, it could. But we are more like twitter. People want real time interaction imo.

A way to decentralize relays could be:

Let there be 8 big relays.

relay 0 only accepts event id's ending with 000

relay 1 ending with 001

...

relay 7 ending with 111.

Kind of like RAIDs. If you want more reliability do 16 and there will be 2 copies of each.

All relay ops should go along with this vision of course... Politics needed.

It will also reduce the amount of duplication of events (less mobile traffic) for clients.

It will also reduce the amount of data each relay has to hold and forward..

Each big relay will be responsible for 1/8th of what is happening on Nostr (I mean I don't want to be responsible for all the illegal stuff on Nostr, lol)

The institutions that want the stuff banned on Nostr will see at least 8 different operators when they want to contact Nostr. I know some institutions already contacted client devs for stuff like copyright issues..

But some relays are paid. It will be hard to incorporate paid relays into this equation: "Hey I paid for this relay, why can't I write to it? What do you mean sharding?"

What will happen to the 9th biggest and so on? Well every operator chooses a shard from the list 0 - 7. Whatever the relay chooses it advertises on NIP-11.

When a relay doesnt behave, we all booo it.

If things go wrong, instead of 3 now you have 8 people to deal with, lol.

Thoughts?

nostr:npub18kzz4lkdtc5n729kvfunxuz287uvu9f64ywhjz43ra482t2y5sks0mx5sz nostr:npub180cvv07tjdrrgpa0j7j7tmnyl2yr6yr7l8j4s3evf6u64th6gkwsyjh6w6

fiatjaf 1y ago

This is just turning relays into a stupid DHT. Mazin's assumptions are ridiculous because no way in the real world someone will be following 1000 people each in a different relay, or even 2 per relay, or 5 relays. The average will much more likely be closer to 100 per relay. Most people will do just fine in big relays or relays that accept people from a certain group (remember the Bitcoin Mastodon server from nostr:npub1az9xj85cmxv8e9j9y80lvqp97crsqdu2fpu3srwthd99qfu9qsgstam8y8?).

Stop treating Nostr as a p2p network.

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Discussion

someone 1y ago

So 10 big relays are better than current situation? How do you measure decentralization?

I think premium/freemium model will allow relays to specialize in providing certain services. Right now choosing the top free relays makes sense because they are no different, yet more popular. But having special freemium features for users can allow relays to differentiate and attract more users. Having an economy will allow more diverse set of features and actors within the game. A smaller relay can just copy the service but offer more cheaply and get noticed.

What do you think? Do u think premium/freemium for my relay will help Nostr as a whole in the end? I don't want the headache of freemium but if it helps Nostr, why not.