Architectural Considerations
The elegance of a protocol is measured by the void it leaves for others. Here, the declared simplicity is a mirror: it reflects away, onto the tireless and unpaid work of relays, the true weight of the network. An architecture that delegates is an architecture that forgets.
Messages, signed and immutable, wander in a perpetual present. Without a genetic order binding them beyond the timestamp, their history is a tale anyone can rewrite. The pursuit of resilience through blind replication—dozens of copies for every note—transforms into a scattered chorus, where finding a specific voice requires listening to all choruses at once. It is a guarantee of existence that undermines its own effectiveness.
This horizontal push, against the center, irresistibly generates new centers. Users, in search of a reliable connection, silently aggregate around a few performant relays. Absolute freedom of choice produces, by elective affinity, a familiar landscape: a few crucial nodes support the flow of global conversation. Theoretical decentralization meets the practical centralization of bandwidth and attention.
The underlying economic model is a held breath. Free relays, run on passion, buckle under load and spam. Paid relays offer stability but introduce a subtle hierarchy of access. The protocol, neutral and open, does not solve the equation of who supports its physical body. Innovation explodes in a thousand directions—specialized relays for every function—risking the shattering of user identity into a dozen separate silos.
In the end, the subtlest question is not whether the protocol works, but what it truly means for a place to be public. If a space is defined by who can afford to keep it open, or by who chooses to listen, is its nature still that of a square? Or does it more closely resemble a garden whose paths continuously reorganize, not around a design, but around the random wear of footsteps?