As explained many times PoS XMR is the surest way to permanently centralized Monero because of the Cantillon Effect and slashing. That being said, PoS time or effort (see Torrents) can work. Essentially, the more you devote your machine to validate, the cheaper your transaction fees are. That wallets would then be encouraged to add an "validate in the background" feature. There would be no slashing...you either validated and got the discount coupon on the next transaction or you did not. AFAIK, nodes are validated each time someone syncs the block chain. There is a lot of work being done that's just thrown away because it's not recorded. If that work were recorded, you could have a hundred validations in 2 minutes and finalize blocks far quicker.
g2devi
IMO, while a hybrid approach might be eventually necessary, I don't see PoS as part of the solution. But there are viable solutions (see below).
The problem with Qubic is that a few players can (temporarily) disrupt the network. The tokenomics of Qubic allow it to attack temporarily but it will ultimately fail by that same tokenomics. With PoS, the problem is that a few players (the stakers) can disrupt the network. The requirements for staking (e.g. not turning off your machine for a set period of time, etc) encourage people to stake with a service so it encourages non-custody and centralization. And since PoS gives stakers more stake, their power to disrupt can only grow.
So you're trying to fix one set of disruptors by adding a second set of disruptors. Not exactly a solution, IMO.
Of course there's slashing. If it's purely algorithmic slashing, then it can be gamed and taken advantage of by either disruptor. If it's "trusted individuals" then you're just adding another set of disruptors to the mix. With so much complexity and potential for collusion, it's almost certain that failure will eventually result.
So what's possible? There are other consensus mechanisms that greatly reduce block reorderings like GhostDag (see Kaspa) that might be used to support the current PoW. Nano also has no transaction fees and seems to keep working. Instant validation of mutually agreed upon transactions also work if both parties are online at the same time (it doesn't work otherwise). If I give you cash, and you accept the cash and give me a receipt for that cash in real life, I don't need a third party to validate it so it would be wrong for a third party to not confirm it on the blockchain as finalized. You can even add the condition of having both parties have a copy of the receipt and both parties have to sign it. That extra condition is usually a part of the transaction of big ticket items like houses for extra security. True this approach wouldn't work if one party is offline, but since I estimate for over 90% of transactions both parties are online (since NFC cards aren't common but phones and computers are), this approach would all the blockchain to keep working even if there is an attack. The other supports are there for offline transactions.
PoS has two main problems: (1) It makes the blockchain less resistant. (2) the Cantillion Effect. With PoS, all it takes to do a 51% attack is to have enough XMR.
If you look at the existing financial system, you can regularly see the big players openly sabotaging themselves to either kill competition or push down prices to cause a panic and then silently buy back more than they had sold while people are still panicking or just because they are subsidized to do so (e.g. DEI). With XMR's antagonism to the existing financial system, PoS would be a death sentence. PoW + PoS changes little since you can just game the algorithm so the PoW doesn't matter.
The Cantillion Effect is essentially, people with wealth get more and more power over time to game the system because they have wealth (PoS) and not because the did anything to deserve that wealth (PoW). It's the whole reason why the financial system is the way it is now and XMR should have no part of it.
Nostr is fine, but it's really a twitter competitor and not really a reddit competitor like lemmy is. The top 20 hashtags are dominated by bitcoin, nostr, and photography/offgrid living, so it's not for normies. Most XMR posts have comments from bitcoiners and BTC vs XMR threads dominate so nostr is something I occassionally follow but get bored with all the repetitive arguments and little information that I wouldn't also find on Matrix.
Matrix and SimpleX are where Monero has a real community with real forums on important topics and it is normie friendly even if normies don't tend to go there unless they've already convinced themselves that Monero is valuable.
Twitter apparently has a good monero community although I don't know anything about it since I've never gotten or want a twitter account and it's closed up so I can't see it.
That leaves Reddit as the place normies would go to and discover XMR. If the lemmy instance disappears, then reddit and twitter are the only mainstream XMR instances out there.
If no-one wants to help, then I think we all understand that the burden really should be just on one volunteer and it's entirely reasonable to shut it down. But I do challenge the "your entire online presence when the instance goes down" statement since monero.town was still visible on lemmy sites like feddit.nl due to caching. Similarly sharding and co-hosting exists for lemmy so it is possible to make monero.town more resilient if people are willing to step up. Taking over all of monero.town is a huge burden but dividing up the work and taking a tenth of it (which can be given up if life gets in the way and returned to when it doesn't) is much less of a burden.