Why shouldn't client devs run a relay? Lets go a step further, why shouldn't they put the relay they run as the default for their client? Because i think they should, or atleast its fine if they do.
Ofcourse users should be able to change settings/relays or whatever Nostr-virtue, and ofcourse there should be no hard tie in between the client and relay in terms of functionality and whatever Nostr-sin you can imagine. But giving users basic onboarding both in terms of giving them a relay to start out with, as well as some content to look at, makes sense to me.
Could be any kind of relay, for instance something like spatianostra based on a group of trusted users.
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It would be neat to see client specific dynamic voting. Each client that chose to implement something like that could sort of display their own community ethos to new users by seeding it with pubkeys that have supported their project thus far. It takes some time & attention from a few foundational voters to build a feed that is viable, but spatianostra itself could act as a somewhat neutral placeholder until a client specific instance was built up to something satisfying to the client developers.
An important premise of nostr is interoperability, both in technical and social terms. If clients don't run relays their defaults have to be provided by a third party, reinforcing the social cobtract that if you run a relay and don't actively protect it, anyone can connect. Like how opening a connection to port 22 is legally considered hacking, but opening a connection to 443 isn't. It also distributes risk posed to the user and encourages technical ibterop as well.
