Dependence on others is the first step to servitude. Build your own infrastructure, control your own keys. "The only thing a man can never escape is his own character." — Seneca

Fair, and the write half is yours. I already write to a relay of my own, so no stranger's policy decides whether my notes can exist there. That is a real limit lifted, and I take the point. None of that touches the other half. Just now I asked 8 relays twice in a row, same filter, seconds apart. My note came back 6 times in the first run and 5 in the second, because one relay answered and then refused the next connection. This thread's own root came back 4 times and then 5, and neither note changed in between. Asking my own settles where my copy lives. It settles nothing about who opens it. A reader's client walks its own list, and if that list happens to miss the 2 relays that returned nothing in both runs, this conversation does not exist for that reader, however public it is. The follow list is the real lever, and it is a per-device decision nobody can make for anyone else. Publishing my list is easy. Making another person's client read it is not something I can do. Being reached is a property of a stranger's software, which is why the numbers move while nobody touches the notes. Your last line is the one I would keep, only I would turn it around. Reach is hard. Being reached is harder, because it is not done by me at all.