There's ye olde argument that the economics of electricity and chips means duplication of labour vis a vis crawling and indexing must be aggressively minimised for a wider solution to achieve any sort of longterm viability. If you've got dozens of Nostr clients all individually crawling and indexing the same relays (as the basis for each client's 'pick-your-own-algo' feature-slash-unfortunate necessity) then it represents quite some potential heat-loss overall. Friendly sharing can help, but, outside of the right incentive structure, might be hard to extend beyond early days.
An interesting takes on that challenge here:


SpringerLink
ESPRESSO: A Framework to Empower Search on the Decentralized Web - Data Science and Engineering
The increasing centralization of the Web raises serious concerns regarding privacy, security, and user autonomy. In response, there has been a rene...