Mazin from nostr.wine wrote this convincing article where he says having gazillions of connections is not a good idea.
I agree. This huge # of connection requirements won't work. Especially on mobile. If we were RSS syncs, it could. But we are more like twitter. People want real time interaction imo.
A way to decentralize relays could be:
Let there be 8 big relays.
relay 0 only accepts event id's ending with 000
relay 1 ending with 001
...
relay 7 ending with 111.
Kind of like RAIDs. If you want more reliability do 16 and there will be 2 copies of each.
All relay ops should go along with this vision of course... Politics needed.
It will also reduce the amount of duplication of events (less mobile traffic) for clients.
It will also reduce the amount of data each relay has to hold and forward..
Each big relay will be responsible for 1/8th of what is happening on Nostr (I mean I don't want to be responsible for all the illegal stuff on Nostr, lol)
The institutions that want the stuff banned on Nostr will see at least 8 different operators when they want to contact Nostr. I know some institutions already contacted client devs for stuff like copyright issues..
But some relays are paid. It will be hard to incorporate paid relays into this equation: "Hey I paid for this relay, why can't I write to it? What do you mean sharding?"
What will happen to the 9th biggest and so on? Well every operator chooses a shard from the list 0 - 7. Whatever the relay chooses it advertises on NIP-11.
When a relay doesnt behave, we all booo it.
If things go wrong, instead of 3 now you have 8 people to deal with, lol.
Thoughts?
@Mazin @fiatjaf
Habla
The Gossip Model Doesn't Scale - Mazin
Websocket connection overhead is an obvious problem with the gossip model that few are willing to acknowledge. The more decentralized relay selecti...
