You shouldn't run a relay at a loss. Eventually nobody will do that. For now, it's temporarily doable for many, so some do it.
Serve these that pay your server bill. Maybe those the paying users like, too. Store events that are in demand, ... Make incentives align.
Yeah, agreed generally what you're saying. I'm doing this for fun. I wouldn't be able to develop the relay code I'm working on without actually operating a relay with some kind of load, so I'll put a cap on connections or data some point like others are doing.
I'd like to not put an arbitrary cap on mine but to cap only the free tier. As long as people pay me for adding more resources, I'd happily do so but we need to develop ways to doing this.
yeah i'd be happy to scale based on payment but also there's this weird gray area between actually running a viable business and hobbying this out on tips or micropayments or whatever. i like some kind of peering approach because then i could participate without having to do either of these
I get it. For nostr to work I just don't think connecting to more than a hand full of relays will be viable especially for mobile clients, so we need some infrastructure that can handle this without sharding probably.
Round robin for example makes sense if you can assure that the servers serve the same data and sync among them but to have my relay forward to yours when it's hitting its limits is not helpful. Relays already are not interchangeable as we don't sync between them.
