One thing I've noticed: almost all nostr profiles have a display name, a picture, and a bio, and almost all of them seem to be stored exclusively on relay.damus.io. I've connected to the top 5 relays on nostr.watch, queried for metadata for random accounts, and I only get responses from relay.damus.io. No one else has that data.

I have a theory about why this is too. I think it's because so many people use the amethyst and damus apps, which start off with damus as a default relay, and the first thing they do is create a profile. So that info goes on the damus relay. Later on, they may add other relays or remove damus. But when they created their profile, damus was their main relay. Consequently, damus has almost all profile data, and basically no one else does.

I know one way to help solve this. I could write an app that downloads all metadata posts from damus and rebroadcasts them to other relays. But it feels like there's an underlying problem there that this idea doesn't address. The underlying problem, I think, has to do with the intersection of "wanting to set reasonable defaults for your users" and "not wanting to make everyone reliant on just one relay." Setting people up on the damus relay by default is a good idea, because so many people are using it. But defaulting to damus also means damus has a bunch of data that few other relays have. And right now, at least for profile data, it seems to me there's an imbalance toward the latter.