It would be awesome if we had someway of seeing a visualization of the network topology in real time as the note travels through clients and relays.
I agree. You would basically have it monitor (every?) note and check which relays it’s on some interval for the first X minutes of its life. It’s quite challenging though because it happens fast!
I think you could just sample and experiment with sending a singular test note to a small relay. But yes, you would have to subscribe to a boatload of relays at the same time right before sending the note, filtering for the note that was just sent.