Ah okay, I get your angle now, fair. I dunno though, would someone ever have an interest in Nostr or Pubky and not know someone on the inside? How would you even come to know of the existence of either if you didn't have a contact? I guess from a blog or article something, but still seems pretty rare to come to a social protocol not via social means, and therefore have an agent of sorts.
Discussion
Even if you don't know anyone, you can run a local network in your town, and it only takes one node to find a node from the mainline big network, for everyone to be entangled in one big network... tell me this is not different from how nostr clients discover relays :)
Come on man, yes Nostr can become a DHT, a small one, but it isn't, not even close, it is not behaving that way and paid relays (the only sustainable ones) have no (almost negative) incentive in losing their advantage as the scarce common well known relays
You're making a lot of good points in this thread.
Also if I was Darth Vader and Nostr was the Republic's social network of choice then the absolute first thing I would do would be to setup a free and highly performant Nostr relay and boost the heck out of it. And I'd do it early too.
Same dynamic exists in Pkarr because relays. The difference is that Pkarr queries the DHT and relays in parallel by default and will always do so, because why not. So a relay used by everyone is very unlikely to be a single point of failure... because the parallel query to the DHT is not expensive.
Even if you are in browser, if only one of the relays you are using in parallel is honest and publishes to and read from the DHT, then no matter how small and obscure it is, it is still bypassing the malicious relays.
It is just too hard to censor.