Don't I select the relays I want to post my nodes to? Potentially dozens of relays.

So ALL those relays are supposed to keep my nodes, correct?

The list of well known relays is quite short. Most users use the same clients and those clients have the same relays in their default settings. Mainstream NPCs will never change those settings or even care to learn the word "relay".

So wouldn't it be the burden of a handful of relays to store everything because every user has those set as the defaults? And isn't the point of Nostr that the data is stored *redundantly*, so actually we want *many* relays to store all the data.

I still don't see how this amount of data wouldn't overwhelm the few good established relays today.

I guess the solution is that every user must run their own relay and just store *their own* notes (and potentially those of first and second order friends?). That means that every user must be a paying user so that in the background we can spin up a relay for them and have the cost covered?

People already refuse to pay for twitter, so they surely won't pay for Nostr. That means there must be a way to show them ads - which is probably very tricky?