I find this extremely hard to believe  

 i don't but the statistic of how many running now would be important to evaluate the meaning od that 

 The relay bloom of 2023  

 And how much did number of total relays drop? 

 this is the question 

 Hard to know without services like https://nostr.watch/  

There has been a big drop 

 Well you better go catch them 🏃🏻 

 nooooooo number go back up 

 deadass ? 

 On god  frfr 

 sheeeesssshhh 

Had a feelin he wasn’t sir cap-a-lot 

 Skibidi people who shutdown their relays

The ones still running them are demure 

 Would be great to know how to control what relays do without having to be a super user. Surely it exists... 

 i’ve ALWAYS wanted to do a relay for a v special group and move a lot of it onto/grow it on nostr… 🥲 

 then ofc, another purpose of the relay would’ve been to orange pill as well…🥲 

 If you’re interested, checkout Westernbtc. Been running strong. 

 why? 

 Likely that there is no one reason.  But running a relay is a thankless task. 

 Melvin existe t-il un moyen aisé de créer un relais et de Configurer les boîtes de messagerie même si j'ai besoin de messagerie privée? Puisque depuis plus d'un mois j'ai cette notification sur Amethyst et impossible d'utiliser echap pour l'enlever ...pour nous les non techs moi particulièrement on galère quoi pour des choses qui devraient être simples et non ..wine j'en ai pas besoin..des tutoriels aideraient sincèrement à user de nostr aisément...merci  

 I think we will see relay renaissance with https://khatru.nostr.technology/ 

 Interesting, I didn't realise pitiuniteds relays were using a new type until now.  Thanks. 

 Excellent documentation on the Khatru site. I hope people will publish their filter implementations, too.  

 Does it bring something negative to the ecosystem? 

 All it takes is for any of the clients like Amethyst or Primal to provide relay service directly from their Android apps.

Tens of thousand relays coming up overnight. Not that I mean that all relays should be public to the world, but they would certainly help to keep a good backup of what happens. For example, I would enjoy downloading the texts from the people that I follow, don't have particular interest in the whole world but would be nice to replay the conversations here some 20 years in the future that I've saved on the phone. 

 an option https://github.com/CodyTseng/nostr-relay-tray 

 Many thanks, that looks fantastic. Went ahead to install but I'm running Linux and for some reason doesn't want to show on my tray. I've message the author, see if this can be solved. Now just missing to convince the relay authors to save the events as text files, otherwise we won't be able to rescue/port the data afterwards. 

 they are saved as jsonl, you can import on coracle, nostrudel. Backup site like https://backup.greenart7c3.com/ 

 Learning lots  of good things today. Thank you!  

 Meshtastic p2p mesh radio network works like this. Every user radio device is automatically a node and a relay. The subnet size that each node can see is the range of the radio and the density of handsets in the range. Replicate that on the internet. Bittorrent essentially also works the same way, each client is a node and relay with the throughput (and also maybe the reach/domain  size?)being configurable. 

 Yes, that might help.   

 Utilities like nostr.guru are gone too :/ 

 Wow. 78%?

Were any of them structurally important?

Which are the largest and which have been around the longest? 

 nos.lol and nostr.mom have pretty long history 

 which ones are those 78%? 

 I bet a lot of these were "lifetime" subscription models. 

 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GZKo4JOakAAo3ny.png 

 correct. When I started writing nostr.watch there were 6 public relays (there were quite a few more but they were experimental/not published) 

 I see no contradiction with OP.
OP says most relays which used to be available no longer are. This doesn't mean fewer relays are available now, just that most of the relays which were available at that point aren't (but many new ones may be).

(Not saying either is true or false, just that they aren't in contradiction). 

 omg...! where do we get the data? how do we move forward from here? 😔💭 

 Well, technically the number of live relays has been continuously climbing for 2 years. Relays come and go, and that's ok. I've had a total of 19 relays, and 7 of them are still online.  

 Where/how can someone see this? 

 What's the difference between paid relays and free ? 

Any recommendations 🤔 

 This isn't good, this isn't good at all.
However, it's not *terrible* either. It's likely many relays were run basically as tests by people who wanted to learn and that what's left will stay much longer.
Still, we do need reliable public relays, which I suggest should be run by trusted nonprofits.