My main criticism of outbox model has always been that it will REQUIRE intermediaries to be usable on most clients if nostr users spread out across more relays.
If all I wanted was for the “smart proxy relays to win” I wouldn’t bother having these conversations.
The fact that any criticism of outbox model is received as “you must have another agenda” or “you must be too lazy to update your client” doesn’t help convince anyone that it’s a good idea.
quoting note1hpu…0wvsthis is what happens in the future if the "outbox-is-broken-let's-use-smart-proxy-relays" people win:
- people start relying on "caching services" to fetch their notes. now every client must run their own caching service to remain competitive.
- as the network grows, syncing from all relays becomes more and more prohibitively and databases grow to the infinite.
- less and less caching services exist, but a "local best scenario" would be if we had like 4 different clients/caching-services to read from, but then if one of them banned alex jones that would mean 25% of users lose access to alex jones. there is nothing alex jones can do to change that.
- users could switch from app A to app B that hasn't banned alex jones, but app B had already banned donald trump, so that move is questionable and uncertain. anyway, it's too much friction for a user who doesn't know how to find this caching-service setting buried deep in their settings (because UX specialists said that's the best place to put it).
- eventually it makes no sense to switch anymore and as one of the caching services gains more market share they merge with the others, saving costs and regulatory burden (these caching servers are so big they need to do spam moderation, find and delete pornography and scam bots, comply with government takedowns, defend themselves against lawsuits, it's a huge cost), so it's much better to just have a single caching-service.
- everybody still publishes to their own relay, so nostr becomes exactly like bluesky and the central service can censor anyone. eventually people give up the stupidity of using intermediary relays and just publish directly to that central service.
- that central service now can serve you ads and blue checks, shadowban everybody who doesn't pay, modify your feed with amazing AI techniques to keep you engaged and prevent you from seeing anything they don't want you to see but keep you nourished with memes.