For Nostr to work I should be able to run a shitty relay on a $3 VPS just to post my own notes and my followers should be able to talk to it. Currently there are dozens of hundred-dollar powerful-machine relays out there and they are all being killed by the DDoS of queries. Clients must get smarter and automatically know how to find people and fetch their posts even if they are on a shitty relay in the dark corners of the internet. Once that happens, then it will make sense for the network to scale horizontally, for people to spread around multiple relays instead of always gravitating towards the central set of the same relays where everybody is.

Not everything has to be automated.

A vision for content discovery and relay usage for basic social-networking in Nostr:

A vision for content discovery and relay usage for basic social-networking in Nostr

(Written a while ago, but relevant for the current relay flood.)

A vision for content discovery and relay usage for basic social-networking in Nostr:

A vision for content discovery and relay usage for basic social-networking in Nostr

(Written a while ago, but relevant for the current relay flood.)

#[0] I have finally read your Blazepoint whitepaper. Do you still stand by its ideas and are going to bring them to fruition within Nostr? If I got it right, the core thing you need there that isn't present in Nostr by default is that you'll have these relays that gather "votes" (reaction events?) from their users and use that to build clusters of interesting content, prioritizing these somehow. The details are not specified.