Thanks! Not to be critical - more like thinking out loud - and don't have solutions to following myself - but that sounds like it could 1) affect negatively to power concentrating into the top popular relays -> potentially leading to same kind of speech issues as semi-centralized ActivityPub, and 2) it won't solve need to maintain multiple firehose connections.
I've been wondering if the multi-firehose architecture is really where decentralized censorship resistant microblogging should be the way forward; I remember the Windows Mobile clients for 2ch.net(today 5ch.io) that would scrape thread deltas from bunch of subdomains under it was plenty fast on 128k(advertised) connection to get thousands of posts in late 2000s, and so I think an RSS style of systems getting delta updates from multiple domains could work without having to do the insanity of early Nostr, or massive liabilities for instance operators with Mastodon, especially if those multiple domains could be set up with relative ease.
Yeah, I don't exactly understand why you have to sign up every time to Mastodon servers and server operators to have to be responsible about users. It worked when it was urgently needed, which was brilliant, but the ID system had under baked spots.
Yeah, any time you need either an index or a caching layer you have to re-centralize one way or another. But decoupling those "services" from the data storage itself helps, and credible exit makes the gatekeepers far less powerful. An example: a few weeks ago nostr.band, one of nostr's main indexers/search services went away. Search is still somewhat impacted (evidence that we were centralized around it), but indexing (i.e. finding users' relay lists) is still covered by several other services.
I've been wondering if the multi-firehose architecture is really where decentralized censorship resistant microblogging should be the way forward; I remember the Windows Mobile clients for 2ch.net(today 5ch.io) that would scrape thread deltas from bunch of subdomains under it was plenty fast on 128k(advertised) connection to get thousands of posts in late 2000s, and so I think an RSS style of systems getting delta updates from multiple domains could work without having to do the insanity of early Nostr, or massive liabilities for instance operators with Mastodon, especially if those multiple domains could be set up with relative ease.
Yeah, I don't exactly understand why you have to sign up every time to Mastodon servers and server operators to have to be responsible about users. It worked when it was urgently needed, which was brilliant, but the ID system had under baked spots.