> In P2P if you ARE the server. Its the same thing. Only in a very reductive sense. The accessibility requirements alone for nostr relays vs a P2P node are huge difference, and your phone does *not* need to remain online constantly to participate in Freenet (the only one of the bunch I'm willing to speak authoritatively about). The network stores the data, not just relays it. I agree freenet is probably too heavy to run on a phone but you can run a gateway, problem solved, and you have far more flexibility for how you run such a gateway, it can be totally private to you, very different from running a relay.

I don't mean to be combative about this (I hope it doesn't come off this way) ultimately like I said, the user base matters far more than the tech. I do wish nostriches were more familiar with what came before, though.

relays technically are only forwarding traffic, but the whole thing would not work without caching, so they are blending it with databases, and because of that, they are also starting to move into the realm of distributed databases. it's pretty much mandatory for nostr to blend relaying and caching together so there must also be a concomitant development of appropriate consensus algorithms that fit the use case. some people think that means blockchains but it's not needed to have strong consistency. eventual consistency, and only driven by user activity, is what seems to me like the right fit for nostr. this is solveable with merkle DAGs, tied to users. on a side note, there is a lot of confusion of domains in the discussion of architecture in nostr. it is a simple fact that the way a relay will structure its caching depends on the users. trying to make the strategy about a subject is blurring the boundary between serving users and serving an application model, and is going to lead to rigid and difficult to modify systems.