Thanks for the action! Perhaps my comments make me seem anti-Nostr, but if anyone reads my articles, they'll find several where I praise some of its design ideas and even implement them from scratch as an exercise in understanding. Therefore, I can venture to say that it has some scalability issues inherent to its architecture, but not due to poor design. It seeks a design somewhere between total decentralization (like P2P) and federation (like ActivityPub/Mastodon), with its advantages and disadvantages. It's not perfect, nor are any of the other solutions. Perhaps the NIP-77 extension mitigates some of the replication, but architecturally, it can't avoid it.

Is it suitable for small communities? I don't think so; it's over-engineering. A small decentralized or federated system is sufficient; successful examples like Tilde or FriendCamp reinforce my point. But everyone has their own perspective; I prefer simple systems without third-party dependencies. Small and sufficient is better than large and complete.