I guess I'm not convinced privileging servers *is* an innovation. On Freenet, SSB(?), IPFS and others, it was always possible to stand up gateway servers. Having P2P primary and servers secondary seems like a superior model, despite some insistence otherwise. It seems that most nostriches have never even used the prior systems. At the end of the day though, I've always said the tech barely matters (past a certain point), the network of people is what matters. That's (primarily) why I gave up on Freenet.

As long as the server cannot change anything you do or did, and you get to choose which server to use, including putting up your own, it's a better model. Dumb server, smart client. You can always opt for P2P nostr if you want and if your friends are online at the moment.

How is that better than no server, smart P2P client? Running a nostr relay requires having a publicly accessible server, and it doesn't provide access to the totality of nostr, just what has been posted to it. The primary objections to P2P I've seen has been speed and reliability. In my experience with Freenet, speed is the real objection, reliability is imperfect, but relays will not retain every note forever either.

To rephrase that, with nostr you *NEED* a publicly accessible server to be a full participant in the network. With P2P you can choose to run a server, even privately, to lighten the load on your end clients.

In P2P if you ARE the server. Its the same thing. You can choose to put a server up OR keep your phone connected at all times (virtually impossible these days). Otherwise, if you are offline, people would never find your posts. Think about relays as proxies to your device's database. They help others get your stuff when you are not online. Relays are not a database. They are a simple temporary storage of your notes.

> 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.

P2P is the only way for #bitcoin or any product you call “from the plebs”. Everything else is just a Venture Capitalist playing with some charismatic dude looking to jump from his back.

Nostr addresses aren't the final solution for the problem of human readable names since ICANN ultimately controls nostrplebs.com or whatever regular domain name. BitDNS (ie. Namecoin) names are a perfect fit for Nostr. They're lightweight, ridiculously censorship-resistant, easily managed and can be maintained with Bitcoin Lightning payments. We have integrated BitDNS for our Nostr client, Nymble, and the app will be available in the next couple of days. If you follow, I'll send you an update to try once it's released.

Awesome, bring it on! let's see if it works :)