Dikaios1517 on Nostr: "Centralize around relays" is a mischaracterization, I think. There are over 900 ...

"Centralize around relays" is a mischaracterization, I think. There are over 900 known relays, all being administered by different individuals. Many users run their own relays, at minimum for backing up their own notes, if not as personal outbox/inbox relays. More people could run their own relays, but assume it is harder than it really is. Tools like Nostr Relay Tray make it incredibly easy to run a relay from a home PC.

It may not be as fully decentralized as P2P would be, but it is a far cry from centralized. Not unless you would characterize Bitcoin as making the same mistake by "centralizing around nodes," because not everyone who uses Bitcoin runs a node, but instead rely on someone else's node.

I'd say that both Bitcoin and Nostr strike a good balance between ease of use and decentralization. Anyone just coming in is not required to run a node or a relay to participate, but we keep building tools to make it easier and easier for people to do so when they understand the benefits.

You say I point to Tor as a good solution. I think you may have misunderstood. Tor is the only available solution to allow you to use Citrine as an outbox relay others can read from, but not necessarily a good one. It only works if your audience is using a client that can access relays over Tor, such as Amethyst. As a result, your potential audience size is greatly reduced.

As you mentioned, though, people can and should post to multiple (at least 3) relays, with three of them being announced as their outbox relays where their notes can reliably be found. That allows people to find their notes, even if they don't have the ability to connect to the phone relay over Tor, or because the phone isn't able to connect to the internet, etc.

I think a relay on the phone is much better as a local-first relay, though, that pulls in notes from other relays for the relay owner to read in their favorite client, and that blasts their own notes out to other relays, keeping a local copy. This would allow users to browse notes and post their own, even if they are currently offline, and the relay will automatically broadcast their notes once they have signal or WiFi, and pull in more notes for their feed. I believe this is the approach that Damus is taking, but I am not sure if that built-in relay will be accessible by other clients running on the same device, or if it will only be available to Damus itself. If the latter, then I would much prefer to use a dedicated relay on the phone like Citrine than to use a client-specific relay for each and every client, which would each be independently retrieving notes and sapping bandwidth, storage space, and battery life.