I’ve been using Nostr, Mastodon and Twitter concurrently for the last few months. Nostr is absolutely fascinating in its simplicity and I really enjoyed writing a Python relay in a few days - more than I should have.

My thoughts:

- The NIPS are not as rigorously defined as RFC's but this is a vibrant community and things are taking shape.

- Relay scaling will be a problem, something Mastodon has discovered with the Twitter migration. The Damus app launch this week brought many relays to their knees. Inevitably as scale becomes necessary relays will centralize.

- Spam, which is free speech in itself, is getting out of control in the relays. Proof of work regulates bots but not crypto spammers.

- The relay construct while powerful, makes it difficult to build real communities with real constructive discourse, which requires some form of moderation. Some might call this censorship.