Oddbean new post about login | logout What if all big free relays only kept your last 50 posts? 🤔 Would it drive the relay market forward?
What if the last 50 notes are free while you pay a certain amount to keep the oldest one.. 👀
this just means they have less events, it does not mean they have less expenses, it might even be worse. They need revenue, not ways for people not having to pay
yes, but the fact they exist, are free and hold notes forever blocks people from searching for a paid solution. Why would you pay for anything if somebody is willing to do it for free?
up until now, people don't really see a difference between the paid and free because there's barely any... paid relays need to diferentiate themselves and actually survive and be performant so people trust them and not feel rugged by paying for 6 months and the relay disappearing after 2...
Speaking of search. Datsmining companies like google might run relays in the future. Just as they held back the development of video platforms, mail clients, map setvices, through sponsoring their own "free to use" products with revenue from google ads. A common good. But it made it very difficult to compete with, since hosting of such services are expensive. And difficult when competing with: "free to use"
What's a reasonable fee? Should the relays automate a lightning invoice each month for the other +50 notes? Today connecting to paid relays are a bit clunky in my opinion.
Yeah there likely has to be some kind of limit. Either on retention time, new writes, or most likely both.
What about a donation button on the list of relays in Amethyst? There is a donation button for Amethyst developers as well. So, why not one for relays? It should be easy within the app.
Donations won't work. Amethyst can work on donations because we don't have operating costs, only dev cost. Relays have server costs + legal costs + dev ops costs.
Maybe it's a good idea to somehow, somewhere prominently show last month's relay costs, broken down in those 3 area's so people have an idea of what it costs to host these relays and additionally show a "drive" of how much of these costs have been donated. It's probably hard because you would have to do it client sided and all/most clients would have to implement this. It's definitely not an end-all solution but giving insight in costs and covered costs at least gives people a general ballpark idea of what we would need to cover in the current situation and make it more likely to pay their part.
It is hard enough to find your own really old posts again because of changing relays from the old days and most social is "now" focused anyway that I'm not sure if I care my posts are saved for very long.
Setting up a site on npub.pro seems to be an easy way to collate your own posts. So this may be a partial hindrance to the freemium model for relays.
Npub.pro doesn't store your posts, it just pulls them from relays, so if you don't have a relay that stores your post for long-term, the npub.pro won't help.
Thanks for this clarification.
Have zaps go to relays?
What's the secret to a better nostr feed experience? I'm on amethyst.
More likely to stunt adoption
Are you going to slow our digital hoarding?
I want my posts to be available "forever". Not that I have anything important to share, but I collect beautiful paleo art in my Amethyst gallery that would little by little disappear, if only the last 50 posts were kept. I already use cellar.nostr.wine so my posts will (hopefully) live on.
hmm good question.. maybe a little bit it might drive users away tho. As for me. It would drive me to run my own relay. I was looking into running my own relay and I setup a test relay recently. It was fairly easy but you need some skills in using the linux cli. I don't think I would open up the relay for anyone except me. It cost a lot of money and HD space once you open it up for anybody and you have to be fairly skilled to keep it running and maintain it once you get hundred and thousands of users using your relay. It aways starts out this way. Everyone runs and starts their own forum, image hosting website, facebook clone website to try it out because it's fun and others run to setup the website to try to monetize it. Eventually we run into the same problem where most users do not want to to pay for a subscription and novelty wears off. So many end up shutting down their websites. Running a service for internet users is a lot of work for no ROI. Don't except to make enough money to cover your server costs because we are currently getting robbed by the banking system and most people don't have money to spend on internet services. It's a tough situation. Once we take defeat the big corrupt banking system. People around the world will have much more money to spend on things other than basic nessessities. One thing I found out is if I started my own relay. It wouldn't gather my past notes. Only the notes going forward. I hope in the future they implement some sort of system where you can download all your data in a zip file and upload it to a new relay. We need the because I see in the future many relays shutting down. It will be sad it we lose our past notes. I see lots of potential with Nostr compared to big tech social media. Especially since it's monetized via the lightning network. Nostr will overtake and beat the big tech social media companies. The fact that Nostr is decentralized is the reason Nostr will succeed. Let's not give up on Nostr. We must keep fighting.
Not exactly same, i have little experiment to store only 7 days old of events. All events excluding main metadata event (0, 3, 10002) will be deleted if they were 7 days old. Metadata events were not deleted. It only takes around 10 GB of storage. It was feasible plan for free relays to do something like this.
I think they will have to. Then they can also introduce a paid plan to keep everything for longer.
Yes, agree. Possibly with Freemium model. Free with short term storage and paid with long term storage.
Would be a win for Elon
Maybe but big brothers' relay keep all posts forever right?
No, that's only the NSA.
...if big free relays only kept your last x posts. Where x decreases to near 0 as nostr scales. Everyone will have to decide to have an ephemeral fragmented social experience, or pay for a certain relay to store notess longer. I think this is inevitable right? Do you need to "drive the relay market forward" Or are you worried nostr will die without any funding for more relay operators? Should we not also be pushing for individuals to run their own relay? The way I see it, people will have 4 choices. Pay for a relay, run your own, have an ephemeral nostr experience, or nostr dies. Some of these don't require paid relays and nostr lives. I'm rambling. Sorry. Just thoughts.
What if you had a percentage of sent zaps go to relays or clients like fountain does. Have paid relays for people who want to create and manage their content. Or have a membership style program that's tiered for clients and/or relays? I'm not sure the complexity of that. Or if there's a way to pay for certain notes that people want to hold. I'd be willing to do that because I don't mind the majority of my stuff being deleted
I'd be done with Nostr.