Nostr Web Client

See the number of relays it connects to. And how many you added. As long as your "following" is fixed, your client only needs to query their relays, not millions or billions of other users that exist on the network, that already exists, as for discovery, seperste completely privately owned indexers could exist and do exist (primal) specifically for this purpose, they will never be able to index all of nostr as well, because that's not possible.

Nostr private keys are locally generated, relays are discovered through peer interactions. It's a bottom up model thats literally built to work with infinite scale because it doesn't waste its time in building a global state.

The global state problem is supposed to be centralizing and is fine if it centralizes because that's not a problem that the protocol attempts to solves.

tree 木 1w ago

So you're actually confirming my point? If I follow 1k users scattered across the network, my client either needs to:

a) connect to hundreds of different relays (massive overhead for the client)

b) hope those users consolidate onto a few large relays (centralization)

The "bottom up model" works fine at current scale, but saying "the global state problem is supposed to be centralizing" is admitting the architectural limitation I'm talking about. Its not possible to handle millions of users without either client-side complexity exploding or relying on centralized infrastructure.

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Discussion

nout 1w ago 💬 3

My Amethyst is currently connected to 200+ relays without effects on performance or battery - it just works - check how many relays you are actually connected to.

tree 木 1w ago

If it's 200+ relays now when Nostr has a few tens of thousands of users, how many will there be when it has millions users? Thousands? Tens of thousands connected relays? LOL

nout 1w ago 💬 3

This is related to the number of people you follow, not the whole network.

tree 木 1w ago

I follow 264 people and it shows 170/281 relays. I think I'm connected to that many relays because the "global" feed

nout 1w ago 💬 2

I don't think Amethyst connects to global by default, I think that's only when you view global. nostr:npub1gcxzte5zlkncx26j68ez60fzkvtkm9e0vrwdcvsjakxf9mu9qewqlfnj5z, is that correct?

Vitor Pamplona 1w ago

Correct

tree 木 1w ago

Ok, I think I understand, I follow 264 people and it wants to connect to 284 relays because those are the relays that have the people I follow set up (not global). So if I follow 2k+ people, it can easily connect to 2k+ relays.

nout 1w ago

It's on demand (afaik) as you scroll through your feed... so it connects and disconnects very rapidly based on what needs to be displayed. My number of relays sometimes jumps to 1500 and then down under 200 again.

So essentially this is leveraging the fact that you usually follow only at most thousands of people and also the fact that you can only view a small number of pieces of content at the same time on your screen. And then finally, some relays are actually shared / used by multiple people, so the number of relays that you practically need to pull from stays similar no matter how many people you follow.

ABH3PO 1w ago 💬 2

Are you going to follow millions of users? Are you dumb or are you just acting malicious?

tree 木 1w ago

I never mentioned "following" a million people.

I don't know how you use social media, but for me it's about information discovery. On Bluesky/X, I follow around 2-3k accounts, but I consume far more content through thematic feeds, easily reading posts from tens or hundreds of thousands of users I don't follow.

ABH3PO 1w ago

I'm unsubscribing to this thread, it's probably a waste of time for the both of us.

ABH3PO 1w ago

a) is not as huge an overhead as you make it out to be. It's already done.

B) no, this is the part you get wrong, indexers(seperate infra only for discovery) is going to centralize, that has nothing to do with users and their relays, users can host their own relays and write only to them, and the protocol still works.