with fully working NIP-42 and enabling keysend/AMP payments to top up balances we could onion route messages... but without payment how you gonna stop it being abused?
Discussion
Keysend only works for the few who really run their own node for that or am I mistaken?
well, yes, so actually to really make it work there has to be some way to run small channels as well
lightning is such a bastard like this... source routing is a huge network gossip overhead cost and because privacy they strangle that gossip down to a minimum and then clients are supposed to be able to figure out valid routes while the topology of the network is partly in a fog of war
it's a really difficult problem, one that is avoided in the bitcoin architecture by using a broadcast which has other, orthogonal privacy implications that are mitigated by UTXOs
i had to spend quite a while studying LN before i understood how it might be used and one of the key things that i came up with - when designing Indranet, which is/was an attempt to make a source routed onion relay network funded by micro accounts paid for using AMP - was the idea of changing the way LN does its topology gossip to make it more open so it's more reliable, and extending AMP to enable multiple redundant paths so that stuck payments can't happen, and the amounts involved are tiny, like at most thousands of sats at a time to reduce the fingerprinting and counterparty risk
basically it would be more or less a fork of lightning to really work, and the same basic principles would apply to an onion routing scheme on top of nostr, except with an overall lower total traffic volume
i think in the long run it will have to be achieved somehow but it's a really thorny problem