So, @fiatjaf, the founder of Nostr, now uses a client which randomly adds meaningless "e" tags of type "mention" when he replies to a thread, pointing to some previous item on the thread. The standard thing for a client to do when displaying such posts would be that of showing the referenced note as a quoted note. I don't think this is the intention. Why do client include tags that make no sense? See this posts for instance: View quoted note → View quoted note → View quoted note →

Fair point, but that is tech debt not architecture debt. Apps don't have to hard code this, its just convenient for now. The source of truth is the PDS and you can self host that with did:web credentials. Eventually if the network gets to a certain scale, there will be SaaS companies like Supabase or Vercel offering 'ATproto relay as a service' so devs don't have to depend on them to build their apps.

Fair response, but I think you're not realizing how big this "relay" stuff can get. It's purpose is to download, store and serve ALL of the posts from a network that aims to be global, so we are talking about a lot of data (and a lot of connections to PDSes everywhere, one PDS for each human), so I think the only thing you can claim is that there will be 2 or 3 other companies running alternative "relays", like Cloudflare, Google and Amazon. Even then it's hard to believe this will happen or that it would have a big impact because it would be mostly inconsequential -- 99% of the people will just use the default Bluesky (the company) relay, and if the Hunter Biden laptop is censored by the Bluesky relay, then the Cloudflare and the Google relay are also likely to censor it, right? Even if they don't, who is going to manually switch? Or if some big influencer is banned from Bluesky then actually starts running their own "relay" for a huge cost, how many of the people who would otherwise be hearing from them would switch? How many people who followed Trump on Twitter joined TruthSocial in order to keep following him?

@hodlbod someone is complaining about your client here.