Expecting everything to work for free is like expecting communism to work.
It isn’t sustainable *at scale* without WoT relays, and even then… the costs will rise when there are hundreds of millions of users storing notes+multimedia+repos.
Paid models with Lightning will come. npub1h0rnetjp2qka44ayzyjcdh90gs3gzrtq4f94033heng6w34s0pzq2yfv0g (npub1h0r…fv0g) will help deliver that — a few things are in the works currently by Siphiwe (npub1ms9…qa0v). I just hope other client devs push for it too.
I remember jb55 (npub1xts…kk5s) was going to offer zap splits to relays before he made zaps!⚡️