I can understand the concern that the relay hints may become obsolete/not work in the long run, but in the immediate (actually short term) of a conversation they are useful. I would say they are fundamental, how can the outbox model be sufficient?
Discussion
Pubkey hints were added a while ago. These are more durable, and can be used to find a user's current relay selections. All that's left is to migrate notes to a user's new selections when they change.
But currently they are not sufficient, as proved with the gitlost experiment. And the migration stuff is not easy at all.
Btw, I think that hints are also an useful historical information on where a note was originally published, so they also have a value in the long term.
No, but that's part of the point. Broken end-user functionality motivates developers to make stuff better. Side note: the quote loads fine on a fresh page load because while I'm not following hints, I am following the relays in the nevent.
> Btw, I think that hints are also an useful historical information on where a note was originally published, so they also have a value in the long term.
I'm not convinced, I don't really see how provenance of a note matters.
> the quote loads fine on a fresh page load because while I'm not following hints, I am following the relays in the nevent.
So don't follow hints only refers to `e` tags?
I call hints also ones in the entities :)
> I'm not convinced, I don't really see how provenance of a note matters.
More materials for Nostr's archaeologists 100 years from now!