Oddbean

"no clear incentive" argument doesn't cut it, never did. There is 100m self-hosted sites on the web, and owners _pay_ to host every one of them. Their incentive is their business/hobby/etc. On Nostr, creators/businesses have the same incentive to run their own relays and to pay for good relays to have their notes delivered to followers. There would be at least 10m relays if Nostr got widely adopted, not counting all those phone relays serving as local caches. Creators pay for web hosting. Creators will pay for nostr relays/media-hosting/etc. I know free social platforms made this a bit non-obvious, but please look around the web. Hundred million people and businesses pay to have their own online space. Nothing new here.

I hope you are right. People try to conflate nostr and bitcoin growth and I cannot see it at all. I always look for the incentives, every aspect of Bitcoin provides positive incentives to human greed. I do not see those incentives for running a relay. The profit/risk ratio does not seem (to me) enough of a driving force for an ever growing number of relays. I hope I am wrong.

There are incentives for those who run them . Ecash mint operators would run relays. Businesse and creators on nostr would. Specialized Clients looking to provide unique experiences for their users would also run relays

We also do this. There will soon be way more relays, including many self-hosted ones, as use-cases advance. And that's not even accounting for each business having x relay mirrors and/or databases for resilience and geographic arbitrage.

Partially agree. I pay hosting for a website which I set up as a side business / hobby. I still pay for it although it clearly didnt work out (so more hobby / can't let go of it). But the initial idea for me at least was to make a profitable business and learn stuff. There clearly are hobbyist / passion sites, but I think that the majority of site owners at least initially didnt plan on paying for the fun of it

I think he's only looking at social media point of view. For that I agree people are used to social media to be free. But if he wants for example to add nwc for aqua the best way is to have a aqua relay Instead of using whatsapp for a company group he can make a relay for his company and use something like 0xchat Most people are seeing nostr just as a social media but theres a lot of the other stuff to explore

Social media is no different actually. Creators making money on social spend enormous money to produce/promote/support their content, adding 10-100$ monthly to have their own relay to make sure their followers get their content is a rounding error. Blue checks are the proof of this. Median user OTOH isn't going to run public relay/p2p-thing on their phone, that's 100% certain. That's where there is zero incentive to waste battery and bandwidth and space to "support the network" where all you do is scroll through memes for a couple minutes per day, when there are alternative apps without built-in relay that don't produce that waste. Readers aren't going to pay for the network. Creators will.

I'm guessing the misconception is that all those creators would run public free open-to-all relays and face huge scaling/moderation/legal costs. That's obviously a bad idea and won't happen. But does an average wordpress site have "comments"? Yes. Does author have to moderate those comments? Yes. All blogs are already tiny "relays" that have some costs that creators pay for. Again, nothing new. If nostr is adopted, creators will have relays to host their own content, and to host legit reactions to that content - other events just won't be accepted. It will require some moderation and some costs, but that's a completely different thing vs managing a big public relay. And outbox model will deliver you the twitter-like experience even though the content is scattered across a hundred relays hosted by creators you're interacting with. Will there be big relays? Yes, twitter will run one, meta another. Will creators rely on them? No, not exclusively. Creators will run their own, that's the whole point. And if DNS/hosting provider kills their relay, they'll just rebroadcast their stuff _everywhere_, until they set up a new relay in a different place. Thanks for coming to my TED talk, as they say.

That's cleared a couple of things up. So in normies words, instead of paying for a web host for a wordpress site, I pay for a relay. And if it were targeted, as in shut down, I can offload the content across multiple relays til I'm ready to start again off my own back. If so, why not set up from the get go with different federations of hundreds of relays and via the handy payment system built into Nostr, I am set up to pay like 1 sat/day to each relay runner. That way, in the event of relay takedowns the average Joe doesn't have to broadcast or run around setting up a new relay, and the pros would set themselves back up quicker and easier.

Automatic pay-per-use is nice idea and I want it explored, it just hasn't been built yet, so it's hard to predict how that will factor in. My point is that it's clear who has the incentive to pay for relays - creators, by running a relay or by outsourcing it.