Have the protocol folks considered some kind of syndication manifest that summaries and publishes pointers to all the events someone posted in a fixed timeperiod (eg 24/12/4 hrs)? Then if they pub that, and you sub that, you could find you had missed some of their stuff that maybe went to a smaller relay. People could pub their manifest to the larger relays - or as a suplement to the gossip flow on smaller relays. But they send their regular messages to interact with them only on the smaller relays in real time. Maybe something like this could support or reinforce the gossip model. Then you could discover that you are missing content from the manifests, and tell your client to go watch for peoples real time content on such and such a relay/connection. But if you dont need it real time, you can just catch the relay/digest/manifest next time it comes out for those folks you still care about. Kind of like the Listen vs Subscribe idea i was thinking of earlier? Whats crazy here? Why is this destructive or what does it hurt as another approach?