I agree 💯, I’m advocating topographic discovery besides other things.

I am have data Jan gave me in neo4j, initially so that I can explore the structure and visuals. I intend to scoop more recent data and publish a graph of the network including relays and probably some pubkeys with large followings.

Later I hope to replace neo4j with memgraph and publish a much broader range of pubkey plus note traffic.

Will be using knowstr.io which I bought yesterday for the graph, also sitting on nostrmarketplace.com hd a few ideas for that including simply listing paid relays and some performance data, but I’m opposed to doing that at the moment as I’m worried about artificially kettling waves of users into a handful of big relays.

I would prefer an organic fabric, even with relays spawning and dying.

Relay costs are an issue and at the moment there is probably vastly more relay capacity than the network requires, especially at the edges. Lots of relays are under utilised.

Load balancing and revenue sharing might be viable but… how to do that without gaining control? Again, I would prefer organic fabric.

nostr needs a commercial solution for the back end. Bitcoin has this, nostr does not.

#note: this is only a late night side project for me. Not full time. More like 5-8 hours a week in a good week. I’m very much following nostr devs and thinking about stuff. I think nostr is very much pre-dawn with high turnover of devs and projects, but it continues to refine. I’m investing time now so that I’m engaged when it matters.