Also just a note; After bootstrapping your peer network a little, you don’t actually have to be online at the same time. Because your peers all have a “blind forwarding” cache of messages that they will pass around until the other user comes online again. So even my one-to-one DMs on Keet or any other Pear app still work fine for small message transfers because *any* of my peers online will hold and forward the message automatically. Kind of incredible how well it works. I haven’t even thought about missed messages for quite some time using the app. After you have even just a couple of peers using it with you, it’s shockingly reliable.
Discussion
yes, relays are like POP in the sense that they cache messages... teasing out the differences from simple cache to authoritative archive is a separate matter, i'm working on this in my every day, can't stop thinking about it of course - we are turning an altcoin system into the archive... my boss doesn't quite fully get it either, he was talking up the idea of relays broadcasting and i was sitting there quietly thinking to myself (dude, bro, we are selling them the idea of their system being the archive)