First, federation is complicated. Go look at the size of the ActivityPub spec to get an idea of the complication that federation requires. Sharing messages between relays is not as simple as just sending the messages to all other known relays. At minimum, every relay would have to keep track of what messages it has sent to which relays, in order to avoid relays spamming each other with 100k copies of the same message.

Second, clients can easily connect to dozens of relays. That's one reason why WebSockets was chosen.

A relay directory that knows all public relays is unnecessary, because users can trivially tell each other, "I am connected to these relays." Moreover, it is not desireable for every client to connect to all public relays. Because in 10 years there could be 1 billion Nostr users, and no relay will ever be able to handle 1 billion websocket connections.

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But Lopp concerned about something that is going the way of fax and chatrooms. Lopp is a social media influencer, which is source of income for him. And to do that job, he needs to know how many people are watching him. But Nostr is not a social media protocol, so social media influencers will not thrive via Nostr. A change of perspective is needed for people to properly take advantage of what Nostr provides (which is so much more/better than social media). Social media is a technological dead-end, like chatrooms, forums, email, and fax.

The project's ambition to be/stay decentralized.

Expecting relays to co-operate, now begs the question, how? Trying to answer that is non-trivial. Which users would like their what data to flow to other relays? And which one? What if you don't want your data to flow across all relays? My guess is, this will be attempted anyway, and be seen as an attack on Nostr.

Expecting clients to sign up to a director begs the question, who maintains the directory and how? How do you get included in that directory? Can you get booted from that directory? Censorship incoming in 3...2...1... My guess is, this will be attempted anyway, and be seen as an attack on Nostr.

Even dolu's proxy linked in this thread's comments, if used maliciously, could be seen as an attack on Nostr.

a proxy will help with mass broadcast

The syncing feature of the strfry relay is something I'd like to experiment with 🤔 when I have more time 😔

Someone should use minisketch to compare events between relays

If relays are going to share state, there needs to be a way to prevent spam on nostr. Bitcoin’s mempools do this by requiring txs pay a minimum fee to miners. Otherwise they don’t relay them for inclusion to other mempools.

Nostr needs some kind of equivalent.

Use nostrproxy

Nostr isn't a centralised, solve your problem, profit making enterprise. There are rules, but frankly after NIP-04 it's all "make it like Twitter" bullshit.

It isn't Twitter, it isn't federated, it's going to work out its own way in the world and the apocalyptic predictions of silos, hoarding, may be right and Nostr isn't the solution. Making it like Twitter though is definitely not the solution.

Jameson Lopp doesn't know how many followers he has, he doesn't know now how many people read his profile and don't follow.

The easiest solution might be to make a relay that follows the relays you've added to your client, then others could follow that one.

PS. Note to self, read then respond. That way I'd find the idea has been implemented; #134918

I think fiatjiaf is opposed to this development, but I believe it is inevitable.

I believe it is possible for relays to broadcast events to each other already