Oddbean new post about login | logout We need to get used to paying for relays. Free relays doesn't work.
Facts. How to pay outside of #btc will be needed if people genuinely want #nostr to grow.
wrong
Which part? Genuinely. Most people won’t come & stay with freedom technology because they believe it’s correct for humanity. Numbers have shown that. Considering the amount of “rug pulls” I’ve seen while studying #btc it’s hard to know who to trust. Besides, where do NPUBS come from? #asknostr
https://image.nostr.build/83c1d4c8857358b2a9bccee4786136fecff2c3ef163f7d6326b8dc751239da53.jpg
Never forget … man likes peen https://image.nostr.build/b22fe4be456dde54104c71e2e512f480d36942df306954a6f7c4455518633d31.jpg
false, he lieks to grab them by the puss
Trump is a corrupt criminal like most in Washington D.C. Top level “leaders” have lobbyists write the laws. It’s all disgusting. But those who think Trump genuinely cares about the 99% of Americans should read what he did while in office. He’s top clown 🤡 to sucking the peen of the top 1% intent on destroying 99% of humanity. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/01/18/trump-presidency-administration-biggest-impact-policy-analysis-451479
You’d be in jail
Did something happen for you to be saying this?
lots of free relays have shutdown and more are shutting down.
I saw this coming a mile away. That's why I spun up nostr.happytavern.co for my personal use. I knew I couldn't rely on free relays to indefinitely store my notes. Stuff like citrine will become increasingly important. nostr:nprofile1qqs827g8dkd07zjvlhh60csytujgd3l9mz7x807xk3fewge7rwlukxgpzpmhxue69uhkummnw3ezumt0d5hsz9thwden5te0wfjkccte9ejxzmt4wvhxjme0qy88wumn8ghj7mn0wvhxcmmv9uzk8xwq 💜
@cloud fodder u were right
Another subscription model you say?
Agree, which are some good paying relays?
nostr.wine for shared and relay.tools for personal relays.
What I am supposed to do with the other relays after subscribing to wine?
Add it to your outbox section (not to the inbox, since only paid users can post there). Keep the others in your General Relay list so that Amethyst can use them to download posts from your follows. Amethyst also shows Recommended relays at the bottom that comes from the Outbox list of your follows.
There is no section which says "Outbox Relays". Do you mean "Public Home Relays"?
yes, Outbox == home. I need to change the name :(
"doesnt work" seems a bit off. Technically, the work.
yes, and we need to move away from the prebiotic soup where microblogging clients mix all relays into a single community.
- different communities, different rules - Actually incentivizes action on reporting - instant boosting is actually less annoying, and encourages relevant rebroadcasting - specialized groups won't worry about vandalism or brigading in their communities.
Prebiotic soup lmao 😅 Accurate 👌
It all depends on the usage. Big public relays should definitely charge money for the service to ensure long term survival and good serivce (bandwidth, storage, etc). Smaller relays used for a smaller set of people or groups will work perfectly fine for free. Everything has a cost, just depends who wants to take on that cost.
I don't know if it makes sense, but something I thought of is: What if Amethyst stored all user posts encrypted with their own key? Then, if the relays go down, Amethyst redistributes from the copy it has. It's a good way to not be so dependent on the relays and not need to have your own relay. About the relays going down, any specific reason? Legal issues, lack of resources, or something like that?
Ideally that would be a local relay like Citrine from nostr:nprofile1qqs827g8dkd07zjvlhh60csytujgd3l9mz7x807xk3fewge7rwlukxgpzpmhxue69uhkummnw3ezumt0d5hsz9thwden5te0wfjkccte9ejxzmt4wvhxjme0qy88wumn8ghj7mn0wvhxcmmv9uzk8xwq. I want to try to stay away of storage for as long as possible and let other apps do that work. But yes, if nothing works, then Amethyst can just have a database and rebroadcast relays into the network.
Another thing to integrate into amethyst 😅
A non profit should fund a general relay for certain kinds. I think that's important. Something like nostr:nprofile1qqs04xzt6ldm9qhs0ctw0t58kf4z57umjzmjg6jywu0seadwtqqc75spzpmhxue69uhnzdps9enrw73wd9hszynhwden5te0wp6hyurvv4cxzeewv4eszynhwden5te0wfjkccte9enrw73wd9hsxv8qkt has done with purplepag.es
The issue is that no one will pay for a relay if there is a free one. So, operators are going out of business just because of the subsidized ones.
The issue is running a relay will be a very niche business for a long time until nostr enters the consciousness of the general population.
Relays will mostly be a cost-center except for the infrastructure businesses. There’s a disproportionate concern with “who will run the relays?” The market will provide the level of relays that are necessary/demanded. No more, no less.
But I do wonder if we missed the boat in making payments required for the use of any relay, web3-style: gotta pay per write but without the space scarcity from blockchains. Then the relay market could really function well.
That works for the web3 people because they see their presence there as alpha to get airdrops and inside info on pump and dumps. I don’t think there’s a lesson for us (in regards to this) for us here. I do think there other interesting things to learn from the web3 scammers
this is true. clients 'decided' relays were a cost center and shoved all their cost there, while raking in the zaps on the frontend. relay settings were too hard for a UX etc. clients will realize there is a demand for relays when the notes stop flowing and none of their users was educated about how or why. feels to me, we are at this point now. i am hopeful for helping clients discover relays with nip66, its hard for 'the market' to exist if nobody can find the storefronts. so nobody knows what to do. nip66 will solve this problem so we can habe marketplace for relays just like a nostr apps store. i am not dooming about this stuff im simply trying to educate.. im a little sad that my nostr exp feels cut in 1/2 because one big relay throttled, if we dont point it out everyone just thinks nostr ded.
I paid for this one: nortis.nostr1.com.To be honest, this was for science because everything worked before as well.
Add it to your Home/Inbox sections on the relay list and use it as backup to all your notes :)
If there are no free relays no one will use nostr soooo
Thats what iv been saying 🤷♂️ If you want long term retention of your notes, run a relay and store your data. Else the relay could do a 30 day rolling period lol Old notes dont get the love they deserve anyways 🤣🤣🤣
The relay should retain frequently requested notes even if older. Also think about profile information and stuff that's longer-lived.
Pay-per post relays with @NWC would be awesome
We likely need a messaging scheme to let Clients know when to ask users to pay if it is per post.
What about pay-per-post with free replies? This would ideally cover costs without creating a barrier to discussion. Though it could incentivise bad reply behavior to circumvent the payment. It could also proxy zaps for reposts and quotes, in regard to surfacing "valuable" notes.
We need a paid relay system that also does some pro-bono work.
That demands proof of work, or it becomes a bot nightmare.
That works.
Maybe, but I can see that limiting Nostr's growth. How do you get people on here with an upfront cost? Most are accustomed to free plus advertising. And if paid relays are the norm, who is going to pay 10,000 SATs a month (or whatever the going rate is) for every relay they want to join?
So, maybe free relays should only keep your last 50 posts?
That's an idea. But something tells me that we would need a better UI for interacting with the relays. Either in each client, or a new relay market focused client. It must be easy enough for normies to understand. UX is prime for non tech nerds
It would be nice to have an in-client resource for picking relays. Even opening a relay list in an in-app browser with a way to import relays to client settings. And better relay descriptors so users can make informed decisions about which relays to pick without having to know someone who can recommend relay(s).
All good ideas. Ideally some clients improve on this and we'll get som website specialized in this, that can be visited by people from clients without this feature.
Something like that makes sense to me. Nostr needs some form of monetization but I don't know how you make it work. I could see people having a bunch of free relays and then maybe one or two paids, but over time I would think we would all centralize around the biggest one or two paid relays just to be seen. If I'm going to be paying the equivalent of $6 USD a month, I'm going to pick the fastest horse sort of deal. I don't know how you fix that.
I don't think that's gonna happen, people have grown used to "free" social media and charging for relay usage would probably slow down nostr's growth quite dramatically. What could maybe work is to have a limited free service (limiting event size, number of events per day, etc) and then having a paid "premium" service without these limitations
I said it a million times: Relays have to measure resource use of their users. Currently the "paid relay" model is to switch a relay to allow my pubkey as author as if storage was the only and main cost. All the readers incur cost and when my client is shitty, it will request the same events a million times over. Only if the relay charges - and I mean a fair charge - will users be mindful with their resource use and switch to clients that are mindful and cheaper.
true and we need a way of creating more relays
Paid relays are going to wind up leading to centralization and censorship. Once money is involved you gotta worry about lawsuits, censorship, control being in the hands of a very few. If you wind up with a monopoly or duopoly or where a few companies buy them up then what? Your right back at those relays choosing who can talk to who on their massive centralized server. Maybe they refuse to let you even use their service. Once they are big enough it won't be any different then blocking you from twitter. Sure, you can go somewhere else but what if everyone is using a relay that won't let you participate.
Whats the easiest way to run a nostr relay? HW requirements?
It all comes down to money If it goes paid relay only Some pleb will spin up a free relay with advertising nostr:nevent1qqs2jkzlddd2s4scyjy2ll60nhnnn5pwx6hezjllqsn65gyejcw44uqprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumn0wd68yct5dyhxxmmdqgsyvrp9u6p0mfur9dfdru3d853tx9mdjuhkphxuxgfwmryja7zsvhqrqsqqqqqpu268y8
Then Nostr is doomed to fail...
Would a pay-per-post model work (similar to classified ads in a newspaper)? Not sure if that would work since there would be an ongoing cost to preserve older notes. Maybe if there was a simple and affordable way for the average user to donate storage and bandwidth to host older notes that had to be deleted from 'professional' relays? nostr:note149v976664ptpsfyg4ll5l80888gzud40j99l7pp84gsfn9sattcqzj6pdk
Pay for retention or purge data after 90 days. Do it relay operators! nostr:note149v976664ptpsfyg4ll5l80888gzud40j99l7pp84gsfn9sattcqzj6pdk
We should face the issue of Nostr's lack of positive economic incentives like Bitcoin. The more people use #Bitcoin , the more miners, infrastructure providers, mining machine manufacturers, and trading platforms can survive profitably through development. We can survive without relying on advertising, but currently, Nostr's user growth and development needs, as well as the development and maintenance of relays, servers, and clients, are consuming developers' funds and time. In the short term, it can be operated out of passion. However, providing services for free in the long term is not in line with the laws of market economy. This is why many relay operators have shut down, as they did not receive funding from opensats before. The client developers who can survive now are also relying on opensats funded by Jack. If jb55 had not had the support of OpenSats before, Damus would not have been able to continue its development. We are very grateful for jack 's strong support for Nostr, but without positive economic incentives, the Nostr ecosystem will only be short-lived. Nostr's survival is extremely dependent on Jack's donations, which has become a new single point of failure for Nostr. We need to rely on Jack's early donations to find a positive incentive economic mechanism, or for each client to generate profits in the future to fund opensats. This will allow #Nostr to enter a virtuous development ecosystem. nostr:note1w8rcafy4tk5ng79v45jfk0059lhmwgrr7pd3tvwtzgv9p4kvmj9s9g80pe
As someone who is just figuring out how this all works technically, I can defiantly see that there is a lot of room for improvement. The solution has to be seamless and elegant with the right incentive structures. I don't know what that looks like. [zap tax, Nostr tokenization, 501(c3) donations] Who knows? All I can tell you is that a world without Nostr is dark and void.
Today I saw an article about the 20th anniversary of OpenStreetMap. Which as open data is using both free and paid servers. Also take in mind computing power and storage is a lot cheaper nowadays, and will keep getting cheaper by moore's law. Of course we do heavier type of applications too, but at least for notes I think free relays can work as free servers work for 20 years with map tiles. https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/10/one-man-decided-to-take-on-google-maps-20-years-later-openstreetmap-is-still-going-strong/
I thought I commented on your note.. but I didn't. 🥲 nostr:nevent1qqs9qjanq3fhp5s4k9ke74px79h6msfmlsctfpuhera93ywrj9w77qgpzpmhxue69uhkummnw3ezumt0d5hsygygv7ldj05fey7smzkf3vjy8324g7v7mwgeqdrfg6cjuql3xejy2qpsgqqqqqqsdutsct
Meanwhile nostr:nevent1qqs2jkzlddd2s4scyjy2ll60nhnnn5pwx6hezjllqsn65gyejcw44uqpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumn0wd68ytnzvuhsygzxpsj7dqha57pjk5k37gkn6g4nzakewtmqmnwryyhd3jfwlpgxtspsgqqqqqqstwcmqn
