And who knows who are run relays and which data do they collect and are interested in.
Discussion
Relays also have the localization issue. The USA has the world's most draconian copyright laws, with Britain as a second place. And the EU has terrible hate speech laws. And etc.
So, a relay might be forced to delete your note, even if it is legal in your own country. Your own local relay is covered by your own country's laws and only accessible over the routes you define.
Its not easy to run a public relay. It will be interesting as soon as there are some compliances with some relays. So relay hosted are not fully responsible for the hosted content but they have to remove it
To add here. I don't think that the relay providers are aware of such problems as they can run into really big troubles and I don't think that they have formed some kind of a smart company
We have decided that whoever hosts and administers our relays should _always_ immediately delete anything they are asked by to delete, without complaint or resistance. Nostr is a nonviolent protocol and everyone can own and host their own data, so nobody else has to protect their events or images.
We also retain the right to remove anything we find offending or illegal from our relays and other servers, and to block whomever we choose.
Public relays are an oxymoron, IMO.
Our wss://thecitadel.nostr1.com is currently still write-allowed, for everyone we haven't specifically blocked, but it will eventually be limited to the same npubs as wss://theforest.nostr1.com, and only be read-allowed for the general public. We don't see this as a real problem, for anyone, as you can use #Alexandria with your personal relay list.
The benefit of subscribing to theforest is that everyone who uses the client at our domain can see your publications and interactions, even if they don't share a relay on their relay list with you, and even if they don't login.
But someone else could host Alexandria and make a different relay the standard client relay. You need at least one, otherwise the client is empty without login, which is sort of underwhelming.