Relays are going to be monetized if or if. Now everything is ideal, in a while it will not be so much, however the protocol allows many possible options, such as private relays. It would be interesting if a user could save all his content in his own relay and issue a note publishing the relay and whoever follows him could consult this relay for example. This would mitigate a lot of centralized load.
Discussion
I think a user friendly relay on a Rpi4 would be a huge boost to this protocol. The current relay scripts are not user friendly, at least from a noob standpoint.
In embassyos (start9) there is a relay in beta.
without clearnet embassy is not that useful
During this year it will be implemented.
My personal problem is that I don't want to expose my home IP address. Will this work through VPN too? Can a relay be routed through it?