Yes and yes

Why and why? 😅

I think there is always need for relay…mind you this is voluntarily things , don’t know if that earn you sats to run relay unless you mentioned it as private relay .

The more the merrier. Supports the ecosystem. id like to be on a new relay with new frens 😀

We need a web of trust relay that also accepts NIP-13 PoW notes from outsiders, or maybe one that automatically starts accepting someone into the web of trust as soon as they post a strong enough PoW note

Can you suggest an existing relay implementation that would be good for this?

Not sure. #asknostr can either of the above relay setups be done with existing software right now?

depends if you have the capacity for moderation and spam prevention. I would welcome a new (fast) relay

everyone should own their own relay.

Who is this relay for? Is it for just you? For you and a select group of people? For a specific community? For everyone in your web-of-trust? Anyone who pays you for access? Anyone who includes enough proof-of-work with their note? Or for absolutely anyone to use except those you manually blacklist? Which relay implementation you use will depend how you want to restrict access to the relay, if at all. If you want to run a public relay, you will need to take the task of moderating it seriously. We believe in free speech around here, but there are types of content that can get you into legal hot water if you are not taking measures to keep it off of your relay.

I had a public relay in mind. But I am glad you pointed out the specific community relay, I was thinking about how to set this up, but from the way a user mostly interacts with nostr (lets say amethyst, primal, damus) there is no obvious way to define "this note is only for relay xyz", unless you wipe out the relay list, only add the one community relay you want to post to, create the note, then add all your relays back again. So from my perspective all relays in the end become general relays at some point, since people just have all of them set in their client. So in the end relays are more of a redundancy setup (you post to more of them if one goes down) then a content specific setup. Or am I missing something here? Unless you have seperate npubs with different relays set up. But most users will want to have one npub across the board probably... But yeah, my original question was if public relays are needed, since there is plenty of them out there. I will always run a personal relay and I am currently in the process of setting up a wot relay. So is there a need for more public relays really at this point?

What you say is true for most kind 1 clients. Your relays just serve to help you be censorship resistant with your public posts by having them stored on a few relays for redundancy. But not all clients are kind 1 clients, are they? For one, there is #Flotilla which is built specifically for relay-based communities. So you can run a relay that is just for a specific community, and white-list anyone you want to give access to the community. Posts to that community relay can either be visible to anyone who is considering joining the community, or only visible to community members, based on the read permissions of the relay. There is also Jumble.social, which is a web client that puts relays front and center, and allows you to post specifically to a single relay, if you choose, without having to change your main inbox or outbox relays. I highly recommend checking it out. As for the question of whether more public relays are needed, you can judge that for yourself. Hop over to https://next.nostr.watch and take a look at how many reachable relays there currently are on the Nostr protocol. One more is absolutely welcomed to have more options available, but ideally we should be moving to something of a modified outbox model, where most users are posting to small and even personal relays, rather than large public relays, and clients look at a user's relay list to determine where their notes need to be requested from, if they aren't readily available on the selected aggregation relay.