That number seems a little excessive. A distributed system should, by it's very nature, be fragmented, but not excessively so.
What advantage would 10M have that 1M would not?
Are we still talking about relaying "tweets"?
Discussion
Decentralization. That's the my minimum to call nostr a sucess. The ideal number is 2B relays.
Tor is decentralized. I don't think it has 10M nodes. Bitcoin is decentralized. I don't think it has 10M nodes either.
Tor sucks. We passed bitcoin's size in database last year with just 4k daily active users. You cant even compare the two. Nostr is orders of magnitude larger than any decentralized thing that exists today.
If you really want Nostr to be decentralized, you should stop asking people to care what relays they use. That should all happen automatically. If a relay dies, a new one should be fetched automatically from an automatically-updated list of relays that can never be exhausted. Just like how nobody cares about what peers they download from when downloading a torrent.
Not really. Nostr is not torrent. And never will be. There is no dynamic dissemination of events, indexing, etc. People have to choose their servers. Or their events will be lost forever.
I don't disagree with the fact that people need to pay in order for their data to remain hosted long-term. I just think there needs to be a better way of incentivising relays to host data long term, without requiring users to manually pick and choose which relays get paid. Bitcoin users don't choose which miners are securing the network. It's a competition. Nostr users shouldn't have to care which particular relay is hosting their data at any give moment. It should likewise be a competition.
There are ways. But the cote protocol doesn't implement any of them. I even if she nips implement it, all if the others will still require you to choose. Regardless of what anyone think. This was never part of the protocol and likely will never be.
A distributed system is literally fragmented to the maximum extent.
A decentralized system lies somewhere between centralized & distributed.
FYI