Oddbean

i guess technically a relay could only allow reading and writing from authorized npubs or they could do heavy filtering to only show content from specific npubs. this is almost similar to what Ditto is doing with their community instances.

And that's fine, let the prebiotic soup be the starting point. You learn the landscape make frens and find where your tribes are, you can worry about how to configure your relays after, especially if you're following others who have already done it.

Essentially, yes. Some methods will work for some people and other different methods will work for others. As long as we have choices and more options for more technical users, but also don't forget about newbies, I think we'll be okay.

i think that creating a "free tier" scheme for reqs that ONLY include a specific npub that is a paid member is one element of making distributed relay data storage more practical another is that the relays need to have garbage collection, so only specialist archivists keep everything and lower the cost of most usage (and archivists can sell that acceses to paid relay operators so they can fetch it and cache it in their GC'd data stores) - and yes, also, my GC implementation is not selective about anything except frequency of access but more advanced GC mark configuration could include things like preferring to purge non-paid member events that have also old parent nodes to be cut off before cutting out the paid relay old events, and so on one of the things i want to do with my work on replicatr is making a "layer 2" event store that you configure with other relays that you share with, so they can distribute events horizontally to shard out storage for users outside of that, tools that let users know what relays are best for getting everyone on their follows both their events and them seeing them would be really useful as well