I think Nostr is just this generation doing what the previous generation did, without any awareness of the history that followed.

Which p2p systems with their inception in the 2000-2010 period survived:

Gnutella is pretty much gone. Limewire, gone. Tor and I2P are creaking under the constant onslaught of spooks DoSing it to unmask hidden services, or user IP addresses, or just shut down onion sites. Tox has almost no users. There's a whole bunch I can't even remember their names, Mumble?, but nobody has even come close to touching the total connectivity that the big tech social media have got.

In what material way is Nostr any different to IPFS? A few pieces of metadata that could have been built on top of IPNS. Where's IPFS now? It's only use case seems to be hosting retarded image files that have their hashes stamped on some shitcoin chain or other.

My first instinct was "who will run relays", and then after watching the spamfest in #Nostr "how will this network not be overwhelmed by AI powered botspam?"

Scaling up a social network system requires the support of phat servers like the instant messenger p2p protocols have that can soak the DDoS.

Funding the running of such high capacity servers is a tricky distributed systems protocol engineering task. We know we can't expect fiat bros to fund it like the chat systems, as we privacy- and decentralisation-fans have been sufficient in numbers to demand E2EE.

The initial paid relay services that have been proposed are still decentralised but trusting them seems like a likely bad idea, and if it gets popular enough, there's gonna be a lot of people zapping sats and getting no actual caching/relaying.

I might be biased, but I think that Indra's network-internal decentralised service access charging is the only solution that will work long term, and it will support all of the other protocols that are suffering due to lack of capacity.

Indra relay operators will have the option to run any number of decentralised p2p services attached to their relay's service ports, set a fee for access to it, and use those fees to scale up the capacity of their nodes, farm them out into failovers and relays, as well as deploy more Indra relays with popular p2p services attached to them. No need to ask a relay operator to store lots of data, they will just set their fees at a rate that allows them to continue to upgrade their systems to cope with growth in traffic.