Oddbean new post about login | logout I’ve started working on a relay long time ago and didn’t see anyone willing to work on relays operators incentives. There was completely no sense to run a relay except for altruism. And everyone was saying its not a problem because nostr has already won because its a protocol and if at some point there is not enough relays you can just spin your own up. Did anything change recently?
Make a paid one.
Why would one put time into developing a paid relay if not only no one is going to pay for it but even theoretical incentives to operate a relay do not exist? Thats what I am (was) talking about - first we, as a community, have to think about the incentives and try to solve them before thinking about enterprise relays, or super mega efficient 5MB relays But almost no one in the community does not see the lack of incentives as a problem. Judging by your answer, you too
My man, I started this whole discussion. I see the bad incentives from free relays as a massive problem. But there are a few relays making money now. So, somebody else found the answer to the why that you are looking for and is making it work. If you need the community to figure out how to make your company work, your company is worthless. That being said, I have been helping several relays getting paid with specs for one-click payments and renewals on demand. So, there are people trying to help if you are interested.
I’m not sure why are you referring to me as I’m company even though I’ve mentioned that I was involved in development. I never had any plans to earn money by operating a relay. I was trying to create a relay that others would operate and earn money on it (because this is the only sustainable way to operate a real relay long term IMO). But I’ve found zero demand for that. So I was right that you don’t think the lack of incentives for operators is a real problem and you are also sure that free market will decide, so nothing changed in a year looks like, sigh I really hope to be wrong and to see some day that someone decided to create an enterprise grade relay without thinking about any incentives for operators and it actually played well and they’ve got more than they could dream about :) But right now I can only see declining number of relays and all of the “paid” relays posting post mortems and deciding to shutdown unfortunately
Virtually everyone I know is demanding an enterprise-grade relay software to run because they already know how to make money with it. I don't think that is a problem. They just don't have any option to use at the moment. So, maybe things have changed since you last talked to potential clients of your software.
I would really appreciate those people to write at least short and brief articles on how they are going to make money with it, I don’t think this is such a big secret in an open source ecosystem, and it would definitely help spark interest in developers
I agree, but I don't think they will. Yeah, the ecosystem is open source, but companies are here to compete, not to teach their way of winning to others. It's a big chicken and egg problem.
I wish those people all the best but tbh I don’t believe they either exist or have some real vision Even if they are real and have such a strong vision they can only keep it in secret… they can’t find a $10k investment/credit to hire a dev? Sounds unreal, sorry, would love to be wrong here :)
Some of them are already building their own relay systems. But that will be private code most likely. My original post was to see if anyone wants to build it in the open with funds from Opensats (which can be much more than 10k).
What do the relay developers you know consider to be missing from existing implementations to make the enterprise grade? If the only thing missing is a proverbial "throat to choke" when something breaks, I might have an idea for a business model 😅
Yo. A Nostr marketplace indexer [nip-15] relay will optionally index marketplaces, along with stalls and products (see: diagon alley model). Commissions paid upwards. Nostr telemedicine app (on enterprise relay). Document management (bloods, diagnostic imagery) is the main challenge. Subscription model. Need devs. Can pay in corn.
Hey, thanks for that! But I’m not interested right now. Did you try asking here https://t.me/nostr_protocol ? There may be some nostr devs who might be interested
Haven't hit the telegram group yet - thanks for the link. Already talking to one dev team, but going to need more... particularly app devs. I have no doubt that it'll be possible to create value / incentives. I think about this problem a lot. Some larger players will have a better chance of trailblazing quickly. If seems logical to me that for-profit organisations (probably startups) will fund relay devs out of imperative, as people start to view and use nostr for more valuable use cases.
There are lots of unsolved problems but there is thr biggest fundamental issue I personally can’t find any solution to and the community simply ignores it. Consider pre requisits 1. You consider nostr to become a social network in modern definition of the term i.e allowing hundreds of millions of ppl around the globe to communicate and discover 2. You do not expect every 3rd nostr user to selfhost their relay on a $5/mo and this to somehow magically allow previous thesis 3. You do not expect 100% of the users to pay $10/mo for the less features any existing “free” social network provides With this in mind, the fundamental problem is the following: The only way to provide customers with okish services requires you to consolidate client and server and at this point you become web2.0 company with incentives to lock your users inside of your ecosystem. If you believe in “free market” you have to understand web2.0 companies tried to break this circle for 30 years without luck. So the problem nostr faces right now is much challenging than implementing enterprise relay or even figuring out this hopium outbox model. But its easier to ignore hard challenges
I think we're quickly going to move toward a mesh of FOSS mobile devices that relay and use I2P / Reticulum or some such. I think marketplaces is the killer Nostr app; not twitteresque clique circlejerk.
In my definition you have a different assumption on the first item - I don’t believe in the foreseeable future there will be a mesh of foss mobile devices that will be used as a social network in todays terms i.e hundreds of millions of users. I could believe this could be true for tens of thousands though. In this case nostr will be completely different product compared to how I see it now and how others see it now. If you believe this network to onboard hundreds of millions of users, I would be cery gld to appear wrong
If the raison d'etre of such an organisation (DAO or otherwise) is Freedom, then it'll just manifest in whatever way is conducive to more freedom. Hopefully we're going to get a big dose of Libertarianism from the US in the coming months, so it'll be a good time to experiment with different value propositions.
"But right now I can only see declining number of relays and all of the “paid” relays posting post mortems and deciding to shutdown unfortunately" nostr:note1r83wrrwngwtdwud4rd93wymk89a7l3p27cem6gdeq75sywgyqc0qcddp44
I’d love to collaborate with someone in the creation of a service that keeps track of your web of trust, i.e. it monitors follows, mutes, zaps, reactions, etc and processes them in real time into influence scores as calculated using the grapevine protocol. These scores will be stored using events which will probably be too large for most standard relays to want to store. But clients will want to access these scores, either by API or by accessing the relevant events, and use them to stratify content. In theory everyone could run a personal “grapevine relay” that stores these large files, but in practice most users won’t do that. But what they will do is pay for a service that runs one of these specialized relays for them. I talk about the grapevine in a podcast with hodlbod — I’ll post the link to the podcast below. Or check out brainstorm.ninja, which will calculate these scores (your grapevine) for you. What I haven’t done yet is build the relay to store the scores as some kind of specialized event. Anyone who knows how to build relays and would like to collaborate on a project like this, hit me up.
Link to the podcast where @hodlbod interviews me about the grapevine. https://fountain.fm/episode/aD6Jp6wGxOOitdqeaBii
What you describe is very interesting and I personally think this is a move into right direction, because still a lot of ppl here think “dumb servers, smart clients, outbox, alltoclient etc” However, you describe it as API or some set of events - and at least at first sight I don’t see why this software should be a relay. At most it may have to know how to connect to relays to get data from them
The main reason for a specialized relay is that the files that store influence scores may end up being pretty big, maybe big enough that most relays will reject them. Perhaps there would be ways to keep the files smaller but I’d rather have the option of larger files without worrying that I’m going to end up pissing off relay operators everywhere. Right now at brainstorm.ninja, I have about 20,000 npubs with nonzero influence scores. That number will grow as the number of nostr users increases. My plan right now is to store them as an event, maybe a modified NIP-51, which is accessed by clients. An API would be another option in case the file size were to get too unwieldy. So I’m not sure yet whether it would make more sense for the calculation of the influence scores to be kept separate from the relay or to merge them. I’m leaning towards keeping them separate, if it’s going to be a relay managed by an enterprise service that charges a fee. But if it’s going to be a personal relay, and the scores will help the relay know which content is worth keeping and which content should be tossed out, perhaps it would make sense for score calculation and the relay to be merged together — not sure yet if that makes sense or not.
Also, @hodlbod has had the idea of a relay+DVM where the web of trust places some restrictions on what data I may or may not be willing to share (with or without a fee) with which npubs. Whether to keep DVM, relay, and grapevine calculations all separate or whether there is a compelling reason to combine them together, I’m not sure.
i am very interested in these wot scores. i attempted to calculate mine but something went wrong on brainstorm.ninja it said i had 40k wot but couldnt show it or etc, i have a follow list of approx 1200.. i will try and run it locally maybe and see whats happening..
Sounds a bit like a social credit system. Ahaha
Usually, the phrase “social credit system” implies centralization. Think CCP. But a decentralized reputation system != a social credit system, in the same sense that bitcoin != central banking.
I'm not sure about that.
The issue with this strategy is that for the vast majority of new users, paid relays are an extra barrier and cause inertia, and therefore, limits or reverses growth. Compare this with the bluesky growth hack where they had big servers that could handle up to a million users from the get-go. The result was that Bluesky went from smaller than nostr, to over 10x bigger. Advocating for paid relays is a poor strategy, because only a few will get paid, and not enough to keep the lights on. That will lead to fewer users, and less revenue. That would act as a further centralizing force in nostr. nostr:note1va4vdey4ygt82m9y206ek74nnml34f2flfcu8lfqugp6t2clv5pslgp7na
"There was completely no sense to run a relay except for altruism. And everyone was saying its not a problem because nostr has already won" nostr:note19c9htd26ek8u0gsvdwwhz70n4a680sz4jnaz6cvwrda2xpq46fzsef58xp
> There was completely no sense to run a relay except for altruism. Which has always been a *massive* motivator, often sufficient on its own, in the field of tech, especially software. Many platforms, organizations and projects are run for this purpose alone. I do not understand why Nostr specifically needs to have economic incentives, or really any incentive other than furthering the fundamental human right to freedom of speech. Obviously you need economic incentives for "enterprise" relays, but I disagree with OP anyways. Enterprises haven't been what has promoted freedom in anything related to software, and I don't think they will be.
anyone should have their own individual light relay (in app?) and above all that these relays are interconnected (each one goes to get the information from the other API or Gossip style) so access to Nostr is from an app and everyone is a relay, the incentive is to want to participate and make V4V as income with its publications.
Whats the difference between in-app relay and p2p?
currently in the apps there is only the client, the idea would be to have the server directly in it