Elephant in the room is that #nostr is not a database system, it's a relay system. But no one wants to admit it.
Discussion
Seems not that expensive to crawl, index and firehose-ify pretty much all of Nostr in its current state. As far as I know Primal's doing it, Ditto's doing it, Nostr.band's doing it, and maybe Nostr.wine's doing it too. Who else?
That trends spreads it'll become a globally-indexed relay system with multiple global indexers.
I'm also not sure that's a bad thing. Or a good thing. Have to let it seep in.
It's a good thing!
I think it could be. "Index Nostr" takes a lot of pressure off "Relay Nostr" and vice versa. But then the focus should be on smooth switching between the two Nostrs, as well as graceful fallback from Index Nostr to Relay Nostr when needed.
In that world I suppose Outbox (a feature of Relay Nostr) becomes at worse a waste of time, and at best a way for Relay Nostr to provide some of the features of Index Nostr in the event that Index Nostr goes down. But with multiple indexers and the relative simplicity and low cost of crawling and indexing the Nostr universe, is that really necessary?
Relay Nostr without Outbox still provides decent fallback in the event that Index Nostr somehow goes down all at once, or for users who want a pure relay experience, or for hardcore censorship resistance use cases. So Relay Nostr without Outbox still takes pressure off of Index Nostr in the sense that it makes Index Nostr less of a scary centralising force.
And it's unique. ATProto doesn't have this relay mid-layer—it's either pull from the firehose or pull straight from the PDS. That relay mid-layer (or fallback layer, depending how you see it) seems like a real architectural advantage for Nostr.
I suppose if everyone accepted this Big Nostr / Little Nostr future then we could go full speed ahead on architecting graceful interaction between the two. Many things now taking a lot of time and effort would instantly become distractions that could be let go of and forgotten forever (mainly painful efforts to squeeze a few drops of index juice out of the dried up relay orange).
I wonder where the current Nostr zeitgeist lies on all that? Anyway with Primal, Ditto, Nostr.band, Nostr,wine, et al. doing what they're doing seems like a hefty part of Nostr is prepping for that dynamic regardless.
Definitely a good thing!