> Paying subscriptions for relays will never work.

What I think we need is nonprofit organizations that run relays as part of their mission.

> Same for clients.

Clients don't need revenue because (unlike relays) they don't have expenses.
We know that the FLOSS community often builds software without economic incentives (sometimes there are sources of revenue in FLOSS, but not always). This won't be an issue.

> Ad-revenue does. Stick to what works and flow the ad-revenue from clients to relays.

Nah, fuck ads. Hackers and nonprofits go brr…

> Removing "spam and illegal content" defeats the entire point of Nostr.

It really doesn't.
"Illegal" by itself is meaningless because there is more than one jurisdiction. I don't follow Canadian laws and, I presume, you don't follow Italian laws either.

Nostr doesn't guarantee nothing get censored, but it does guarantee nothing *that at least one relay will host* will disappear. If your content is so harmful for the relay itself that no relay would host it, or those that do cease to exist as a result, your post will disappear.
If you want to prevent this, you'll have to look to other systems, such as blockchain-based social media. Some exist, but Nostr isn't one of them.

> Nostr (or any decentralized network) needs a way of obscuring and anonymizing relays.

The way exists outside of the scope of the Nostr protocol and it's the darknet.
You can very well make a hidden Nostr relay. The main issue I see with it is performance.

The reason you might want to remove spam is simply that it's of no value to the user, while still costing you space. There surely isn't any requirement that Nostr relays must remove spam. In fact, most probably don't, currently.
But if it becomes necessary I don't see that as an issue.

> If gov bans free speech, and Nostr enforces it, then Nostr is rendered useless.

My stance when I learned about Nostr was, and continues to be today, that Nostr is not a solution against government censorship but, rather, against corporate censorship.
Right now the public is often constraining themselves to what Google, Meta and Twitter want to allow. This isn't good and Nostr can solve it.

The solution against government censorship isn't technical, it's political. We need to defend fundamental human rights and liberal values.

That said, there is never going to be any way to make sure that Nostr relays host all content. This was never the intention of Nostr. The workaround against filters at the relay level is using multiple relays and trusting none of them.