Refusing to follow people is a good constraint, you have to put in the effort to find relays that have some reason for why you'd want to view their posts.
Discussion
I try to stick to global relays while not following anyone
What feels like it might be a fun UX is if you had 100 relays each with its own personality, and it was like one big magazine stand.
I think if they were more topic based it could catch on better. Did you find anything good?
You're right. It's not too hard to find relays that are selective in some sense, but there's a lot of content overlap.
I guess the issue is the concept of topic-based relays and the concept of multiple redundant relays are sort of at odds. For me, I could wave bye-bye to the multiple redundant aspect, it doesn't seem to scale in practice anyway.
If the relay network then just became one big magazine stand, I'd be up for it. I think.
Magazine stand sounds like a recreation of newsgroups / Usenet and probably wouldn't scale well either (although the amethyst dev has shown that 500 relays works). It does sound appealing though, and with moderation it would get nostr away from microblogging, which could lead to adoption from larger communities and projects. No idea, just spitballing
This is true, but maybe there is something to be said for newsgroups/usenet, plus key pair identity, plus some of the other bells and whistles.