Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Interesting argument by @gord that Nostr represents an unrecognized third type of distributed architecture after federated and p2p (which he suggests don’t quite work due to rise of oligarchic or supermodel end-games) — a relay architecture. Curious what people think of this typology in general. 2 or 3 seems like a weird number for a typology. If it’s not 2, 200 seems more likely than 3 Periodic table of distributed systems topologies? https://open.substack.com/pub/subconscious/p/natures-many-attempts-to-evolve-a
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Varun Srinivasan
@v
It's a good article. I would argue though that Farcaster is performing better at his definition of a relay than Nostr itself is. Many relays are now blocking spam users and tending to become federated relays.
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Mr. Wahala
@chaoscontrol
A good article that condenses a lot of the vague thoughts I've had on this problem before. I do think that a "dumb relay" is the only architecture that captures the strengths of a pure p2p model while also allowing the specialization and trade necessary to scale. The issue is remuneration. A dumb pipe is by definition a commodity, where not a lot of value is going to be captured. This is great for users but makes it difficult to incentivize good relays. If running a relay isn't profitable enough the system degenerates into either a pure p2p model or relays have to find a way to value capture (breaking the dumb pipe model). This overlaps with a lot of what the "decentralized storage" systems (Filecoin, Sia, Swarm etc) are trying to do, but despite a lot of work in that area I don't think there is anything that just works well enough to call a success. I don't think Nostr makes an attempt at attacking this part of the problem. I am optimistic that a solution exists, although it might not be easy.
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Rumblestiltskin
@rumblestiltskin.eth
I believe Secure Scuttlebutt did a similar thing with "pubs" distributing that content. I think BlueSky is also planning this kind of architecture.
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