I feel like there was an initial burst of support and the relays either outgrew their resources and/or operators have lost motivation without financial incentive. That being said, I plan to keep my free relays operational and performant, indefinitely. You're welcome to include them to your use 🤙
Discussion
Yeah I think this is a problem. I believe brb.io was running on decent hardware so not sure about that one in particular but I think a lot of the other early relays were on small VPS that wouldn’t scale well and many people can’t justify paying for them out of their own pocket as they need to scale up. I think longer term most relays will need to move to a paid subscription or pay per event type model to remain viable.