My goal in making grain was to reduce this list. 2 of them are my own relays. It's hard because you want to have reach, (your notes on lol or damus, but you don't necessarily rely on those relays to indefinitely store your notes)

As a user, I'm skeptical to remove the big relays because I'm unsure if all clients will look at my specified relay list for my notes. Grain will get a backup relay config soon enough. Then you can specify a blaster relay as your backup and know you've broadcast to a big public list while your relay list can remain small.

Hrm. Would how this be related?

with 11 relays and let's say a relay URL is ~20 characters long that's then 220+ bytes in the zap request. that still should be good, I've seen muuuch more than that.

Alby Hub for example also returns that metadata in the transaction list and as the whole transaction list also has a size limit (as it's just a nostr event) a lot of transactions with big zap requests can become an issue there, too.