If the problem that Nostr solves is, say, posting NYT headlines, pub crawl reports, or cute cat pictures, it's fine, but most centralized tools are also fine.
If the problem which Nostr is trying to solve is being censorship-resistant and allow for dissemination of information which is actively being suppressed, relay safety considerations become important. Less safety means fewer relays, and a need of a personal connection / trust to be admitted.
Because almost all of Nostr logic is in the clients, you can always run your own relay or pay someone to run it. There will always be someone shady that will run a relay for you if you pay enough for it. And people that follow you will still be able to see your posts.
I agree that the current state where there are hundreds of open relays and people people posting to 20 of them at a time isn't likely to be what the network looks like in the future. But that's fine - it's good enough for now.
It's a bit like posting to your blog anonymously, and having a bunch of mirrors.
This sentiment is what's missing in the decentralized space. There are so many centralized spaces that you can use to communicate, and that censorship-resistant is a non-feature.
Then you are going to convince a judge that the thing on my disk belongs to me, because judges are apparently braindead.
If this is the protocol’s glaring vulnerability then every server in the world has this vulnerability.
This is also the case for tor exit nodes, which is why those here are all hosted by organizations with lawyers.
As you distribute the content here, unlike with tor, you would essentially act as a user generated content provider and would have to take steps to prevent the abuse from occurring again… probably after an involved court case.
This is not like "every server" because not every server distributes what anyone publishes to it.
Though a lot of that might not be an issue in jurisdictions with saner laws, I don’t know specifics.
Signed by a private key which has no connection to my legal identity, and which can be generated in a split second. Signatures give strong pseudonymity.
> Relays don’t have to store any message on disk
This is a good idea, as long as messages are relatively few, which may be hundreds of thousands if they are short. There's no promise of availability, so an infrequent reboot is free to erase them.
> Then you are going to convince a judge that the thing on my disk belongs to me
I'm afraid it can be the other way around, if the material is sensitive enough. You'd have to explain to the judge how it ended up on your computer.
> every server in the world has this vulnerability
No, only a server that allows users to upload UGC without requiring enough background information to let the law enforcement find out their real identities if need be. Should be an adequate explanation to the judge in a civilized country where governmental censorship is not a thing.
So just to be super clear, you don’t upload images on a relay, nostr messages are just signed json blobs i.e text. If you want to post an image you just post a link to it and the image is hosted elsewhere.
If there is such a thing as an illegal text string that is illegal to have on your hard drive then I can do the same attack on any webserver by having the illegal string in my user agent and it’s going to be saved to the hard disk in the logfile.
Then according to your plan I can raid the server with the illegal string and put the server owner to jail. Does that make sense to you?