Sure, it's Wei & Tyson, "An Empirical Analysis of the Nostr Social Network":
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.05709 The 98.2% is download traffic, not relay-to-relay sync. Across 17.8M posts and 712 relays (second half of 2023), the average post sat on 34.6 relays, and since clients subscribe to every relay in their list, they pull the same event over and over.
On curation, expiry and registered identities: I agree, and that's more or less my point in the article. A relay that only accepts its members and drops old content is a small community with a gatekeeper and someone paying the bill. That's fine, it's what I'm arguing for. But "the content survives when a node drops" comes precisely from the replication that costs money. The more relays curate and expire, the more survival depends on someone (often just your own client) keeping a copy to republish.
I also wonder: if each administrator has their own rules and configurations for their respective relay, is it a decentralized or a federated network?
I wrote about where each protocol puts its single point of failure (identity, discovery, cost) here: https://en.andros.dev/blog/603e4e90/there-is-no-such-thing-a...
On curation, expiry and registered identities: I agree, and that's more or less my point in the article. A relay that only accepts its members and drops old content is a small community with a gatekeeper and someone paying the bill. That's fine, it's what I'm arguing for. But "the content survives when a node drops" comes precisely from the replication that costs money. The more relays curate and expire, the more survival depends on someone (often just your own client) keeping a copy to republish.
I also wonder: if each administrator has their own rules and configurations for their respective relay, is it a decentralized or a federated network?
I wrote about where each protocol puts its single point of failure (identity, discovery, cost) here: https://en.andros.dev/blog/603e4e90/there-is-no-such-thing-a...