Also, I also don’t think relays are under the obligation to store notes forever. Part of scaling horizontally is hosting your own long term storage (or pay a provider to do that for you).
If a relay needs to scale vertically, they could start charging for access or do data mining+ad injection, all kinds of stuff to monetize.
One of the writers of the NIPs posted this earlier today:
> Other relay ideas (not very good, just to sparkle your imagination):
- a relay only for people with top-level domain names (no "@" at the NIP-05)
- a relay that only stores the most recent post of people
- a relay that only stores posts that have received at least 10 replies from other people (big threads)
- a relay that only serves posts to people having $X tag on their profile metadata
Those relay ideas seem like the whole new level of screaming into the void. It doesn’t sit well with me that not only there’s no promise of saving my data but rather ideas of not keeping my data for me are floated around as a normal thing.
https://www.nostr.how/relays "If all the relays that you have used in the past go offline, all your posts will be unretrievable. This is one reason that Nostr allows users to connect to many relays – this ensures some degree of backup. That said, if you're really interested in being uncensorable, you can run your own personal relay."
So clearly, relays are retaining copies of your data. The question is really storage capacity: if nostr becomes popular, will individual relays have enough storage capacity for all of its users?