Oddbean new post about login | logout One common complaint we hear from Nostr haters is that there is no economic incentive to run relays or that the network will be centralized in a few central big relays. These claims often come from confusion or misunderstandings. I think this 40s video will clear all the matters and answer all the criticisms: https://cdn.satellite.earth/8e48f90f4889d6d8def300e9d843b9b353375426212f6b6253a8ee6aaaefcf07.mp4 If anyone doesn't understand or has a problem with this answer, please, I would like to hear it.
$20/ month is expensive imo. Is that the future?
it's less than my Netflix subscription
That was just a quick theoretical example and not everyone would have to run one. There are multiple paid relays available right now that cost way less than $20 per month. Don’t get anchored to that number, instead try to focus on the concept.
He is measuring in canadian bolivars
Maybe I missed the point @jb55 was saying, but I come at it from two angles. 1) $20/ month is more expensive than what it costs to use twitter, instagram, or facebook, so most people won’t do it. 2) check your financial privilege. it’s a point a privilege that $20/ month is a laughably small amount for you to consider, but for some folks that’s a lot of money, so you just priced out poor people from running a relay. Open to hearing what I missed!
$20 cuck bucks is more then some people make in a year still…
This is misleading framing. $20, or as fiatjaf clarified $3.50 to run the relay for your community of 3,000 people. $20 nor $3.50 is not a cost to participate. Compare to twitter ID required (billions dont have this), and bank account required (billions dont have this).
I have lots of trouble using Primal nostr and I think it has something to do with the relays. It will randomly refuse to load for a period of time, in full or part, it will randomly forget mute lists, I am getting anon payment requests from 'relays...' It's just a frequently frustrating mess, and I don't think his response is nearly serious or in-depth enough.
Best link on learning how to run a nostr relay on one's computer?
Make a one click installation on a VPS and this problem is solved. Cost nothing to rent a relay hosting service
Didnt Samson say it had to be big relays
The explanation seems packed into the “outbox model” phrase which I’m not familiar with.
In-app marketplace for media bloom servers, relays, shop profiles and etc I think would also help a lot for determining what services are desired, where and how.
Thinking about this post by @fiatjaf about the cost of #NOSTR relays. Relays are web sockets, a server and a client. Web sockets over #NOSTR should be cheap, because notes are broadcast, and when broadcasting notes, sockets are very efficient. Let's say @jack posts a note to a relay, that relay can BROADCAST that identical note to all it's clients who subscribe to Jack as opposed to sending differing data to all it's clients. To estimate the potential savings, let's consider a scenario where a web socket server sends 1 KB of data to 100 clients. Same data to all clients: Memory: 1 KB (a single copy of the data) CPU: 1-10% CPU usage (depending on the broadcasting implementation) Network: 1 KB (a single packet sent to all clients) Different data to each client: Memory: 100 KB (100 separate copies of the data) CPU: 10-100% CPU usage (depending on the packetization and sending implementation) Network: 100 KB (100 separate packets sent to each client) In this example, sending the same data to all clients can result in: 99% memory savings (1 KB vs. 100 KB) 90-99% CPU savings (1-10% vs. 10-100% CPU usage) 99% network savings (1 KB vs. 100 KB) Keep in mind that these estimates are rough, but it makes the point that #NOSTR nodes should be very efficient, and thus relatively cheap in a competitive environment. nostr:note1dqk63v3nrvtkhjye29t7zzwwrrlxqh6tvld4x00jvlm2ye55zmkqmumahc
This video isn’t convincing me at 100%. I worry about the storage capacity of the network. We know social medias generate a shit ton of data. I get the horizontal scaling but this is gonna take a lot of relays. It’s also gonna require clients to be capable of connecting and holding to a lot of relays simultaneously. Some options I’ve heard is too use Archive Nodes which I think is a great idea.
Public relays don't need to keep everything forever. Anything worth keeping will be stored on Personal or Archive relays.
Agreed. But it can be perceived as a “downgrade” from the current crooked social medias that allow me to scroll back as far as I need.
I sort of agree. Hopefully there will be some incentive for archive relays or something
I hope so yeah. Many people dismiss this too quickly as you can see in the comments
It doesn’t need to be stored forever … you can just back up your notes and wipe relays periodically
So thats something to note and anticipate. Current social medias (despite being crooked) allow me to scroll back as far as I want to.
damn. you took your diplomacy pills today. 💊👍
I'm even using a suit as I write this.
You nailed it, the complaints come and will continue to come from confused n misinformed individuals.. Just look at this reply section right now 😂
SOMEBODY EXPLAIN THIS OUTBOX MODEL PLEASEEE!
Simplified TLDR: you know which specific relay to check for which person. Aka “hey I use this relay #123, so please check there to find notes I publish”.
So wait, a client will first search a small set of your preferred relays for your profile, then it will look for your follow list. In the follow list, it has info about user profiles it finds your follows' profiles from your preferred relays and then in each profile, there is an outbox. Now your client is querying for data across many relays for many people (optimising where it can) and aggregating that data before presenting it on screen. Is that the gist of it or are there any technical mistakes?
Many who build an application on NOSTR, will have an economic incentive to host relays. With lightning, many people may get into the business of hosting relays just like BTC miners take fees for transactions, and the computing power would be FAR less expensive. This area is very interesting to say the least.
I don't know if it a valid complaint but my main problem with this answer is that a computer dork looks like a sexy and buff movie star and seeing that makes me not want to leave my house ever again.
IIUC it'll be up to clients to intelligently pull from the relevant relays in an outbox model? Won't this make generating a feed very difficult? I'm assuming we'll need indexers or something for clients to be able to serve a feed to users in a reasonable time frame. nostr:note10dkggtezgrzg6mtd7gmgrhcxg6qjax2vsjsfsp7hmw6r39a0vypq0egfjw
I think it's even faster, more efficient and uses less bandwidth, but try https://github.com/mikedilger/gossip or https://coracle.social/ and tell me if it's unreasonable.
What is this "outbox model"?
The outbox model is where each of your followers can see your chosen relays. This means when they want to update their feed they know which relays to query for your information.
lol Nostr devs don't understand anything about infrastructure? If we grew in size, the computing resources will grow. Using many Nostr relays in a client is kinda shitty and kills your data plan and battery. Using 1 Nostr relay that syncs a lot of relays is a better idea but uses a lot of storage and will be terrible for self-hosters as Nostr grows
Well, well , well. Look familiar ? Bittorrent's bleep. It died , I think because the feds took over the bittorrent company and then killed off this idea. Probably too much if a threat ? There may be open source forks out there ? "With BitTorrent Chat, there aren't any "usernames" per se. You don't login in the classic sense. Instead, your identity is a cryptographic key pair. To everyone on the BitTorrent Chat network at large, you ARE your public key. This means that, if you want, you can use Chat without telling anyone who you are. Two users only need to exchange each other's public keys to be able to chat. " https://engineering.bittorrent.com/2013/12/19/update-on-bittorrent-chat/
I think this is not a complaint though I sometimes wonder if something like zap split or V4V model x pay-as-you-go model will eventually come to certain relays. Say, everybody always has some sats in wallet to post and some amount of sats automatically get splitted to a relay that has LN address when a certain 'kind' threshold is exceeded against a relay. The key is relay runners can decide how to run relays of course and to not force people to pay sats to use relays, keeping it opt-in.
it does help, having one of the biggest clients with the biggest relay endorse outbox while still not having implemented it yet. its raising the bar for clients, i get it takes time, is harder to implement, and im very patient, but i will not shut up about it. Cause i was promised a nostr where "if you dont like it run your own relay". any clients still not doing outbox, are dangerous to the network and the idea of freedom on nostr.
also, speech is more ephemeral and not a ledger so some loss of data is not the end of the world.
💯🎯💯
Actual speech disappears instantly and only exists afterwards through first or second hand written accounts. Nostr may not be able to permanently keep a record of all notes, but through nostr our speech is much more likely to last for decades or even centuries and millennia.
Makes sense to me. Also: if illegal torrents work and scale, how couldn´t Nostr work and scale as well?
If I can get VPN (I can't work on VPN -must use legacy tech) I will run one for free. I live in Central Virginia so my internet is spotty #loading ✳️
FUD must be debunked indeed. Same with Bitcoin, there is always fud. Can I run my nostr relay with umbrel? nostr:nevent1qqsxstdgkge3k9mtezv4z4lpp88p3lnqta9k0k6n8hex0a4zv62pdmqpr3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumn0wd68ymmdduh8xmmrd9skctczyqalp33lewf5vdq847t6te0wvnags0gs0mu72kz8938tn24wlfze6qcyqqqqqqgmk3anc
How can I find the best relay to load updated events from a npub? I can find a relay with nip5, and with nprofile, but how I do that if I have just npub? Should I search for 1002 kind where? Adopt a default cache relay like primal? #asknostr
You should look for 10002 (see nip-65). There are relays that aggregate these events, e.g. https://purplepag.es/what
Thank you. Now I understand why it's called purple pages
This, and also to have every client be a relay as well, for the current user that's using it + their X level of WoT with Y limit. Damus has or is working on something like this (Not sure if they're doing WoT for it) nostr:note1dqk63v3nrvtkhjye29t7zzwwrrlxqh6tvld4x00jvlm2ye55zmkqmumahc
"NOSTR haters" are basically peddlers of desperate BS, trying to keep us tethered to the centralized SV-based platforms that have done us so wrong. And whose followers, I might add, are extremely dubious people -- not "entrepreneurs" as was always claimed, but likely assets of the state, or even worse, foreign governments or international crime networks. Decentralized social media threatens the surveillance, grifting and brainwashing apparatus they have so carefully built. The only value these platforms have (to their end users that is) is their network. We should be using their services to poach people to places like Nostr.
Should read "founders" above, NOT followers... Autocorrect did that. And it messes up the meaning of the post.
Insightful, thanks! nostr:note1dqk63v3nrvtkhjye29t7zzwwrrlxqh6tvld4x00jvlm2ye55zmkqmumahc
I'm not a tech guy, but hearing this might look like you are saying that the Web is starting to be rebuilt on stonger foundation than 30 years ago. Like I listened to a podcast with Jack explaining that what once screwed up the legacy web was the discoverability issue leading to Google&Co So are you basically saying that nostr fixes this? Seems to good to be true, this why their are still lots of nostr sceptics/hate IMO
How many devices are left on at home for the convenience of the "just in case"? It's all about what we value. Running a relay for free is doubtfully more expensive than these expensive rarely used electrical commodities we have on standby.
Good idea
A one click solution would be ideal. Make it easy to run a relay and more people will do it.
Agree. I have web servers and would like an easy install into existing infrastructure.
There is value to running your own relay such as having it as an archive of your posts and other stuff, and also to serve as a caching proxy to reduce client load, and a private server for stuff you don't want to spread around, like drafts. Also with nip 29 it can be a more private way to run groups. Additionally a relay that is combined with hornet/blossom can serve as a replicated and encrypted data backup. I think the use cases will continue to grow.
I would love to run one. Just like a btc node. I'm not there yet.
Who will run the relays? All of us. nostr:nevent1qqsxstdgkge3k9mtezv4z4lpp88p3lnqta9k0k6n8hex0a4zv62pdmqpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhsygpm7rrrljungc6q0tuh5hj7ue863q73qlheu4vywtzwhx42a7j9n5psgqqqqqqsal33r2
Daddy @jb55 👅 you remind me of my Canadian doctor ex boyfriend 🤷♀️ sorry for the joke, don’t tell your wife or @jack
You look exactly like the Canadian family medicine doctor ex boyfriend. Canadians are so nice when the ex wanted to marry me, he asked me out on one knee wearing the same shirt you’re wearing and took me to a beautiful island 🏝️ for proposal, but I’m a full time slut so I’ve never been married but the doctor ex bf and I are still friends and occasionally talk to each other
If you messaged the Canadian doctor ex boyfriend on fb and asked him why he proposed to me, to this day, he tell you that I’m the best sex of his life 😉 💯 he’s married now, so my loss but he still tells me this
I went to a Canadian med school so most of the men I dated were Canadian doctors
And the micropayments can help monetize nostr:nevent1qqsxstdgkge3k9mtezv4z4lpp88p3lnqta9k0k6n8hex0a4zv62pdmqprpmhxue69uhkummnw3ezuendwsh8w6t69e3xj730qgsrhuxx8l9ex335q7he0f09aej04zpazpl0ne2cgukyawd24mayt8grqsqqqqqpmpc633
I'm running a public relay while i run my bitcoin and lightning node and also cashu mint All this isnt about money
Learning while securing our freedom. Don't care I'm running a fiat deficit doing that😁
What is the outbox model?
Each client publishes 1-3 relays they are writing to, and 1-3 relays they are reading from. Your feed comes from subscribing to the write relays of those you follow. People communicating to you send to your read relays.
Ah, I see. Okay, makes sense
One common complaint we hear from Nostr haters is that there is no economic incentive to run relays or that the network will be centralized in a few central big relays. These claims often come from confusion or misunderstandings. I think this 40s video will clear all the matters and answer all the criticisms: https://cdn.satellite.earth/8e48f90f4889d6d8def300e9d843b9b353375426212f6b6253a8ee6aaaefcf07.mp4 If anyone doesn't understand or has a problem with this answer, please, I would like to hear it.
Aren’t people running relays to store their own data? Apparently the free relays are still growing. Seems to be mostly the app developers running the relays
なんかそういった話で進んでるみたいですね（outboxモデルで？）🧐 nostr:note1dqk63v3nrvtkhjye29t7zzwwrrlxqh6tvld4x00jvlm2ye55zmkqmumahc
That's awesome! Honestly, the more I think about it, the more I realize it's way too early to be concerned about scaling issues. The Outbox model works well, and there's room to scale the current implementation. If Nostr grows so much that we have scaling problems, that's a good problem to have 📈
