I made a relay that charged for access and started working on a framework for making custom relays with arbitrary policies in early 2022:

GitHub

GitHub - fiatjaf/expensive-relay: a nostr relay that requires a single registration payment per pubkey

a nostr relay that requires a single registration payment per pubkey - fiatjaf/expensive-relay

I remember using the phrase "relays must have personalities" early on too, and saying that Nostr finally realized the Mastodon vision of having communities form around servers (as Mastodon failed spectacularly on that). I also remember getting angry at the hundreds of people who misunderstood Nostr as some kind of neutral data layer for cryptographic keys (generally the same people who are happy to just hardcode 4 relays in their apps and call it done), or people who tried to do spam prevention using any techniques that were not based on knowing some relays to be free of spam and others not, I wrote this, for example, as an early attempt to nudge the conversation in the right direction: View article →. I don't know why you think this is bloat. It's the opposite of bloat. I hate bloat, but relays with personalities are the only way to avoid bloat. Without relays doing custom things to prevent spam, curate content and acquire reputation we're left with megalomaniac specs for doing the same thing on the client side in a much less efficient and less personalized way (as you can see from all the bizarre specs we've seen being proposed throughout the years). By the way, DVMs are a clear example of what happens when you start to treat Nostr as a form of neutral data layer. DMs too, probably, then in the evolution of the DM spec you see how things went, with overcomplication on the client-side in order to try to achieve some ideal privacy that in the end is only still guaranteed by the relay (NIP-17) or Marmot, which requires no comment. Anyway: if you don't think relays should be different, then how do you account for incentives?, i.e. should every relay just accept any note from anyone or how are they supposed to filter content?

theres a fine line between relays having a personality/filtering/curating content and poorly attempting to make events exclusive to them. the idea of restricted access to events on nostr is a joke, thats just not compatible with the protocol. those NIPs are useless. there are and there should be a variety of relays, because of the need for incentives but also because some stuff just cannot be done client-side. now something i wish people looked more into is user or local communities owned relays - which are closer to the user - that's an opportunity to get done whatever is too heavy to do on clients there, making sure users have full control over it. even the outbox model would scale better that way, having clients fetch events from a home relay.