There are not supposed to be good and bad relays on Nostr, at least not per se. If Nostr is working as envisioned then asking which relays are good should be like asking which numbers are good for an IP address. Relays are not supposed to be smart enough to really differentiate themselves in "cool" ways.

There are supposed to be just the relays you are using and the relays you are not using. And what differentiates them in general is limited to mundane things, who owns them, what region are they in, and so on.

Nostr only really scales if the load is spread across hundreds, if not thousands—if not tens of thousands–of relays. You can't spread the load that way if people clump, so motivation to clump needs to be removed. (Obviously if certain relays are seen as "good" then people will clump there, and at present over half of all users are clumped around 5 or so relays.)

There's argument to be made that (a) this vision is already damaged beyond repair, and (b) Nostr is showing more potential in terms of things less reliant on relay spread, such as interoperability—and as such Nostr should pivot.

Yup. I think a lot of potential but there's so little money in the Nostr ecosystem, and so few users—I think under 20k daily actives if going by nostr.band's stats, and that number feels about right from playing around there. (A post can get five or six replies and it'll be in the top 20 trending for that hour on the whole network.) A lot of passionate devs there, but you also get the feeling that a group-wide, low-level burnout may be on the horizon, as the demands of life take back over and a business model (any business model) seems years off. Plus this past year has been very much a golden-opportunity year to pull users from legacy social media, and Nostr's numbers have been more or less unchanged going back 365 days (again nostr.band).

So I think it's a real race for Nostr. It represents something really unique and maybe even a consequential future architecture for the internet at large, but it'll have to hang in there while the needed refinements get done. Can it hang in there? I don't know. It'll need a LOT more money, and large well-funded teams, and a clear path to 1 million daily actives. A pretty tall order, suggests why Jack may be deciding the protocol needs some high-level power nudging.

Ditto.pub seems to be doing some work here, although far as I can tell their model entails some sort of quantum superposition between posting to a group and posting to your own feed and thus to Nostr in general, I'm finding it a bit hard to wrap my head around.

To be fair it's only the client (AppView) doing the banning, at least in these more talked-about Bluesky cases. If the banned user setup a DID and downloaded their repo they can get going again and still be indexed by the relay and viewed on another client. That's not to say the relay can't filter, but as of now it's only doing network level filtering and likely CSAM, etc. And maybe Bluesky will spin out the directory and there will be multiple relays in future, which would make it sort of poly-centric. So it could go either way, I think a year will tell.