This will become de-facto place to access nostr web apps on iOS.

Ah right, somehow I didn't see your full reply until now. We're definitely on the same page then. My feed is pretty image heavy, every third post or so. For something like an Olas it's all images, so the question of media hosting and CDN costs there is pretty glaring.

But you're right, Nostr's biggest problem is indeed that it's not decentralized for even plain text. I don't know what the latest stats are, but before it was something like half of all nostr users never write even a single event to anywhere outside of the top 5 relays.

Relays don't matter if they host notes that point to media that doesn't load. You could have millions of notes spread perfectly evenly over 10,000 relays but all pointing to just 3 media hosts. Take down those 3 media hosts and you've created such a mess that many users wouldn't bother coming back, every other post or thread would be missing the media context needed to make it make sense. Media serving is just as much a chokepoint as relays.

General thoughts on payment and decentralization aside, I'm not sure why the focus on relays?

If I post a video that's 100MB and 1,000 people watch it in a month, that's easily $5 in CDN costs, depending on where in the world the viewers are and the network tier.

The relay cost to store and make available the 500 byte note pointing to the video would be next to nothing, maybe not even $0.01.

If the only text in the note is "OMG this is hilarious!" then the note is meaningless without the video, so the video cost can be seen as part of the cost for that note.

What I'm getting at is even if there were somehow free relays for everyone, the bulk of the "Who pays?" question still remains.

Fair point that there is nothing at the protocol level—what business models do exist are all over-the-top. Some people might point to one or another over-the-top model (nostr.wine, etc.) and say that business models do exist, but that's missing his point.

Something that also makes it hard to tackle is the fact that relays don't store or serve media. A note on a relay might be 500 bytes, but that note could point to a video that is 100 megabytes. And those paying the infra costs for each would have to be incentivised individually, given that relays and media servers are separate worlds.

Food for thought.

It does need a v2, but I think it's either very close to (or already past) the point where a v2 can be implemented without both killing the V1 and dooming the V2 to failure. If there is still time I also don't know how a v2 (several breaking changes) gets done, besides someone influential simply forking it and successfully marketing their fork.

It's not really slow growth though—it's actual shrinkage. Since the New Year down by about 12% or so. Also those dropping off are likely to be genuine users and not the suspect portion of the daily "trusted" pub keys. So maybe 20-30% shrinkage in actuality, who can say. These things go up and down, but it's been years at this general level already, and I have a feeling the next 12 months or so will determine how robust Nostr really is.

Also it's losing users and you can feel it. Each time you come back it's more and more down to the hardcores.

At this stage Nostr should be at least gaining a modest number of users each month, definitely not losing users.

With these kinds of things, as always, if you have all the shares, you have the secret, and with Nostr the secret is your forever password. And the threshold of signers have to be online to work. So to use this as a password replacement you'd have to put some thought into the setup. Most people will be lazy and have all the signers on the same laptop, but that won't work for when they want to sign in on mobile and their laptop is not online. So cloud then—but it's a little tricky to setup a cloud environment that protects from collusion. So this will take time to get popular.

Spot on. The problem is the Twitter clones now have so much gravity that it's very hard for anything else to reach escape velocity.

There are not supposed to be good and bad relays on Nostr, at least not per se. If Nostr is working as envisioned then asking which relays are good should be like asking which numbers are good for an IP address. Relays are not supposed to be smart enough to really differentiate themselves in "cool" ways.

There are supposed to be just the relays you are using and the relays you are not using. And what differentiates them in general is limited to mundane things, who owns them, what region are they in, and so on.

Nostr only really scales if the load is spread across hundreds, if not thousands—if not tens of thousands–of relays. You can't spread the load that way if people clump, so motivation to clump needs to be removed. (Obviously if certain relays are seen as "good" then people will clump there, and at present over half of all users are clumped around 5 or so relays.)

There's argument to be made that (a) this vision is already damaged beyond repair, and (b) Nostr is showing more potential in terms of things less reliant on relay spread, such as interoperability—and as such Nostr should pivot.

Yup. I think a lot of potential but there's so little money in the Nostr ecosystem, and so few users—I think under 20k daily actives if going by nostr.band's stats, and that number feels about right from playing around there. (A post can get five or six replies and it'll be in the top 20 trending for that hour on the whole network.) A lot of passionate devs there, but you also get the feeling that a group-wide, low-level burnout may be on the horizon, as the demands of life take back over and a business model (any business model) seems years off. Plus this past year has been very much a golden-opportunity year to pull users from legacy social media, and Nostr's numbers have been more or less unchanged going back 365 days (again nostr.band).

So I think it's a real race for Nostr. It represents something really unique and maybe even a consequential future architecture for the internet at large, but it'll have to hang in there while the needed refinements get done. Can it hang in there? I don't know. It'll need a LOT more money, and large well-funded teams, and a clear path to 1 million daily actives. A pretty tall order, suggests why Jack may be deciding the protocol needs some high-level power nudging.

Ditto.pub seems to be doing some work here, although far as I can tell their model entails some sort of quantum superposition between posting to a group and posting to your own feed and thus to Nostr in general, I'm finding it a bit hard to wrap my head around.

To be fair it's only the client (AppView) doing the banning, at least in these more talked-about Bluesky cases. If the banned user setup a DID and downloaded their repo they can get going again and still be indexed by the relay and viewed on another client. That's not to say the relay can't filter, but as of now it's only doing network level filtering and likely CSAM, etc. And maybe Bluesky will spin out the directory and there will be multiple relays in future, which would make it sort of poly-centric. So it could go either way, I think a year will tell.