Oddbean new post about login | logout Is it just me, or does it seem like everyone is super reluctant to monetize services and relays on #Nostr? If we can’t make these things sustainable then we will either lose them, or they will stay nothing more than a weird little corner of the internet with lots of hope but no chance of ever scaling. I still haven’t seen the basic model of zap sharing tried by any major client or relay. But I DO see regularly comments about how expensive relays are. I mean it might not work, but can’t we TRY it? I want to make the distinction here too that this doesn’t mean we are closing off the network, we are adding permissions to the protocol, this doesn’t suggest at all to used closed source code, we simply need the services necessary to keep this ecosystem robust, to be profitable and have the resources to thrive. If they aren’t, then NONE of this works. Economics is everything. I know building features is more exciting. I know we all want to make everything that we can free, and I agree all of the *code* should be shared. However, I think there is a natural insecurity (and I say this because I have this problem personally) with charging a fair price, and fearing criticism or the ire of people who believe everything should be free (as in price) when we need things to be free (as in Liberty). They are not the same, and confusing the two could stifle, or drastically slow down, the insane potential of this place. TL;DR We have GOT to divert some energy to thinking about how to make this ecosystem sustainable, or we will lose it. (Disclaimer: this isn’t a judgement on whoever is thinking about this problem. It just *seems* like few are. If you are building in this way please share your ideas or what you are trying. I’m extremely interested)
I think the market square is still too small. Once social bandwidth picks up here the ball will start rolling.
And for this also, best not try to force things. Market forces will need to guide the process. Any form of intervention is still socialism.
Is hard to come from a “free” social media market, to suddenly pay for 3 relays you don’t know what they do. Could be counterproductive. But I see your point and agree.
Thats why I like the zap share model. No charge upfront for the bulk of relays, but your client or preferred relay takes a portion of every zap by entering the split into the invoice when it’s called. So every time I zap 1000 sats, like 100 go to damus or whatever main relay I use. Then I can also treat this like a sort of built in backup service. Whoever your primary relay is can also store all of your notes. It might not work as I imagine it, but I still think it’s low barrier, shifts incentives toward encouraging and drastically simplifying everything around zaps (which would be huge), and could *maybe* actually be a meaningful source of sats for providers of this network.
I love the idea and would definitely be willing to share sats. Although I agree money should go to the clients as well, it seems like the relays have the greatest cost (maybe I'm wrong) and should get a larger portion than the clients. The clients have more of a fixed cost that scales more easily where the cost goes up for every added user for the relays.
Agreed. As a developer, I'd love to put some time and energy in developing for nostr, but I also have a family to provide for and spend time with so it needs to be monetarily worth that time.
It’s not just you I’ve observed the same thing. I think there is a perceived stigma against subscriptions and other “fiat mindset” monetization methods. The reality is actually quite different. Early adopters of Nostr are extremely willing to pay for products they like and use. Striking a balance between finding a sustainable business model and not paywalling something to death in its infancy is a challenge.
Still don’t clearly understand what paid relays I should use, and why, but my enthusiasm for this space remains and I want to build a future where costs are low and value is high,.. Potentially with a circulating online bitcoin economy of goods/services/zaps as a healthy biproduct.
Some of the why on paid relays in no particular order: - Increased reach (many clients/users only read from paid relays in global as they tend to be spam-free) - Performance (not universally true of course, but a relay with income is more likely to invest in their infrastructure) - Reliability (same as previous but more likely to invest their time in monitoring/keeping the relay running) - Note retention (many public relays will clear their dbs and start over without notice if it becomes a strain) - Contribute to a more sustainable future (if you aren’t paying for the product, you are (or will become) the product) I won’t give you individual recommendations as I’m of course biased but if you ask around and check out the websites of various paid relays, you’ll find the right one(s) for you!
This guide needs to be updated a bit (as in I think nostrich.land relay is no longer functional), but it should help: https://habla.news/tony/1680693703323 Mainly explains the benefits of Nostr.wine and suggests a few free relays worth your attention
I like the approach taken by Stacker News. You get a few free posts after which you have to pay. Perhaps relays could implement something like this with some extra bells and whistles to make the charges more palatable.
I like this idea
Paid for a relay from soon after it was available and very happy with my purchase. MOAR please
What value does this relay bring you that free relays don't atm? 🤔
//Cyph3rp9nk Note from march 2023 Tips for Relays. Forget about having a thousand and one relays. The first option is to pay for nostr.wine, it allows you to use the filter.nostr.wine filter. The filter works both requesting events from other relays and sending events to other relays. In case you want to send events to other relays you have to add the relay with the following syntax: wss://filter.nostr.wine/REPLACE_WITH_YOUR_NPUB?broadcast=true Reading list: wss://relay.damus.io wss://nos.lol wss://relay.current.fyi wss://brb.io wss://nostr.oxtr.dev wss://relay.nostr.bg wss://no.str.cr wss://nostr.mom wss://nostr.zebedee.cloud wss://relay.plebstr.com wss://offchain.pub Writing list: wss://relay.damus.io wss://nos.lol wss://relay.snort.social wss://nostr.oxtr.dev wss://relay.nostr.bg wss://nostr.fmt.wiz.biz wss://nostr.mom wss://nostr.zebedee.cloud wss://no.str.cr wss://relay.plebstr.com wss://offchain.pub The next special relay is relay.nostr.band. This relay reads events from all relays and applies a spam filter, in the case of writing you only write to relay.nostr.band but it is a good complement to add content to relay filter.nostr.wine as it only requests events from your contacts and your contacts' contacts. It is not clear to me from which relay is requesting the events as the code is not available. And finally the relay nostr.mutinywallet.com. This relay uses blastr which is a nostr cloudfare worker proxy that publishes to all known relays. Basically what it does is to read the list of online relays from nostr.watch and all events are queued to be executed in batches by another worker that rotates every 30s if there is an event queued, or once a certain amount of events are queued. In this case the relay is write-only. In short, your relays could be reduced to 4: wss://nostr.wine wss://filter.nostr.wine/REPLACE_WITH_YOUR_NPUB?broadcast=true wss://relay.nostr.band wss://nostr.mutinywallet.com With them you save bandwidth and battery, actually filter.nostr.wine in write mode and nostr.mutinywallet are redundant, but I put the two because nostr.mutinywallet.com has more amplitude because it publishes in all the online relays of nostr.watch and also because it has high availability in case of failure of any of the two relays mentioned above. The same case is applicable in the case of reading for filter.nostr.wine and relay.nostr.band.
I think we're coming right along. as people see the opportunities and niches, there will be paid relays that will provide all the services and free services that drive traffic to paid ones. just like everything else in the digital space. free, freemium, premium, ultimate, tip jars & beggerware too, will be terms we're going to see here as well.
What do you want to sell? People can literally run their own private relays for free or $5 a month. What can you provide that is cheaper than that?
People still have to connect to your relay to get your feed. Hosting your own relay will literally never be meaningful competition for broader network relays as a service. For the simple reason that no one wants to run their own server. This has basically been a truism of the internet since forever. We could all just as easily say Google Drive and email will never be a viable service because everyone can run their own cloud storage and email server for relatively cheap. But that clearly doesn’t happen that way.
Why do you think centralized relays are better than 10000’s of personal ones? A relay doesn’t need to connect to everyone for it to scale. Just as the lightning protocol, you don’t need to run 1000’s of channels for it to be useful. Are you really arguing for a centralized Google Drive on decentralized Nostr? Something is not right with that 😆
I don’t think you read anything I wrote if that’s what you think my argument is.
Think again 😁
Then you failed to understand my point. Or are just strawmanning a ridiculous version of it to get some sort of “win” by making it look like I’m trying to suggest something retarded. Either way, it kinda feels like you aren’t interested in a real conversation but instead really want this to be a Twitter pissing contest, which I have no interest in. If I’m wrong on that assumption then that’s my bad. But I don’t see this likely going anywhere positive. So I’ll just say I hope you have a good day. 👍🏻😁
Lol. I’m not doing anything like that. Stop being so defensive. Point is you cannot create a centralized marketplace like Amazon on Nostr, it is too expensive and no one is going to pay $50 to join 10 relays to see the same stuff being sold. Peace 😁
Don’t think I’m being defensive but maybe I am. Just not interested in countering a position I don’t hold and I felt I was pretty clear. For example: “Point is you cannot create a centralized marketplace like Amazon on Nostr” I completely agree, but I never suggested this in even a remote sense and I don’t quite know how you pulled that from any of my notes. Glad there’s no hard feelings though and hope you enjoy the thread. Some great ideas being shared, imo (which was the point 😉)
Pas Jeff s'il vous plaît de plus il est officiellement sur nostr son outil Amazon tout comme celui de Larry est énorme financièrement mais enfreint plus Google Méta les données personnelles malgré toutes les règles RGPD DSA MICA ...ils sont très fort sur aws et Ishare
Merci Guy et à tous je reviendrai dessus demain . Bon soir et bonne après-midi chez vous
De manière ouverte en termes d'échanges d'idées les gars c'est qui fait nostr
They already say it’s too complicated because of keys and relays. Imagine asking people to also run their own relay. Not to mention the security nightmare of people who don’t know what they’re doing running publicly accessible internet services.
Eux même ils ont commencé à faire payer le cloud qui fut gratuit depuis un certain temps .. allez jeter un coup dans les nouvelles conditions d'utilisations de nos 5 grands de la Tech y compris la branche Ishare de Larry ...Depuis Obama et la dernière crise notre Monde a trop changé vers un autre où les États et dirigeants n'ont plus rien à dire en termes d'orientation...🙍
I love this call out. 🤙 When I first found Nostr, I spent a lot of time thinking about monetization and the implications of an open protocol approach to the internet. The last 20 years has been built entirely on a model of captured network effects which drive monopolies and VCs who are happy with a 90%+ failure rate in their investments because they know that when these monopolies succeed, they end up owning an absurdly profitable and defensible business. It's my belief that Nostr is going to drive many much smaller, but still profitable and sustainable businesses. In a way, it'll be a return to a world dominated by small and medium businesses each serving their customers directly with product and services that those customers appreciate and pay for. Whatever the long-term outcome, I'm with you on the need for intense experimentation with pricing for most/all Nostr projects. We need to treat these as businesses, not just hobbies.
Exactly. A hobby network will not and cannot ever be adopted by the entire world. But a profitable ecosystem of network provision on top of a completely open protocol and a universal social graph you can take anywhere, will fucking destroy everything in it’s wake. I love the way we are building & love the community ethos, but I’m here to change the fucking world. 🔥🫡
Linux enters the chat…
But also. Please teach me how to monetize skillz. I often sell myself cheaply.
One of the challenges with a hyper capitalist economy is that most content / production on a money forward basis returns to its cost of marginal production, which is zero for ideas (and wind energy and solar energy, etc.). How do you create a network that operates profitably if there is no defendable “moat?” This is why railroads are such a fascinating industry…the value of a single railroad from A-B can capture almost the entire value of the supply chain from A-B … a second railroad alongside A-B renders both almost totally worthless on a go-forward basis. Technology (compute) has this challenge … expensive to develop upfront and then the profitability is tied to the marginal cost of production on a go forward basis (low). Same with pharmaceuticals, same with commodities, etc. The Bit Block Boom relay I paid for went down recently … no idea why …
Agree that most tech does asymptote to marginal cost but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t moats. My guess is that brand is going to be become the most important driver of business success. In a world starving of attention signal cutting through the noise is all that will matter.
Mais un écosystème bien détaillé surtout explicité pour tout nouveau nostriche ne venant pas de la Tech mais a des idées pour créer ou apporter des solutions (sur le plan social, économique, professionel: sociologiquement parlant tout ce qui peut être utile et aidant à tout quidam sans oublier les différents contextes socioculturels...et tous enjeux de survie de chaque espèce avec notre environnement commun. ..voire plus ailleurs sur d'autres planètes vivables pour toute espèce
Guy je serais intéressée d'avoir un aperçu de votre vision pour changer le Monde, et pourquoi pas faire comme sur votre note voire des questions ouvertes qui permettent de bien mûrir vos approches
Your view on this new way of competition and no 'winner takes all' has been on my mind a lot since our last call. I really couldn't have thought of this myself and still have difficulty wrapping my head around what it means for the future, and how we should anticipate this. It's contradicting so much of what I've learned last year in my studies. Good stuff!
I'm building relay management systems with lightning payment capability that goes toward relay costs.. eventually the relays will also zap back out in various other ways.. also building out a relay directory and ways for relays to promote themselves. relay.tools It's hard for relays to monetize right now as it's a chicken egg problem. You need people to join the relay, and clients tend to hide relay configuration and ship a default set of relays or run their own large central relay. This should evolve I think, given time.
I agree this is something important to get right. There’s a chicken and egg issue too. Hard to sustain a business on a small pool of users, hard to build a business strong enough to handle sudden growth with funding. I am watching with anticipation to see who (outside of grants and VC funding) will be the first people to make a living on Nostr.
It’ll be shitposters 😂
Praying it's a regular person with mininal skills that lives of nostr zaps 1st via subscriptions. Whats a better reward for all the work put in, than to see it's actually changing lives of everyday people? (That can in turn go out there and spread adoption)
Agree, for Nostr to grow or make it more popular, some business models need to be explored. For Nostr, this is a relatively early stage, and many problems need to be solved through donations and sharing of basic technologies. Just like the early computer operating system, but later still need to Nostr platform can appear on the sustainable profit of the product, so as to comply with the economic law, the platform can continue to develop. Because we can't always rely on jack's donations to serve hundreds of millions of users.
J'admire votre approche mais le modèle existe de par le côté communauté très aidant en termes d'intégration nostr et cela doit l'être pour ceux qui ont des idées et qui ne sont pas des techniques, va falloir veiller sur des valeurs éthiques pour certains ne retrouvent jamais dépouillés de leurs idées ...j'ai dû remarquer via certaines notes des défaillances de copies de créations rien du fait d'un oubli de signature et ce fut réellement
I used to think a lot about monetization, then I ran the numbers. For the simplest service I could monetize (image hosting), I could make about $80/mo. There are a few other things I could turn on, but it would probably not get me past $500/mo, and would introduce lots of headache. Better to build now, monetize later when we have the scale for it to matter. Plus, I fully expect to monetize something other than my current project. Making a living off a twitter clone seems dubious, but there are many good businesses to be built on nostr.
It boils down to some services requiring to stay free or you scare people away. People are willing to pay for things that make sense to pay for but it has to provide some clear value beyond the traditional social media experience that everyone is accustomed to using for free. I think it will be easier to monetize with more users as you’ll find your tribe of 100 easier (assuming you implement subscriptions). This is why I wrote a while ago about doubting v4v sustainability without subscriptions. You need to have recurring (read predictable) revenue to run any sort of business. If you have no idea how much you’re gonna get zapped this month or the next, it’s difficult to plan your business - hire, allocate resources. MAYBE as you get to massive scale and you get enough data to see what the average month zaps look like, you can work with raw v4v zaps, but I just don’t see it happening this early with our user base. Now… if you implement traditional fiat subscriptions, I think you’d be close to fully monetized or at least 50% monetized just by the passionate supporters that most of us are. Not everyone will pay, but enough will that it will make a difference. Of course, better if this subscription is in Bitcoin ;)
Cela ressemble à une note que j'ai lu antérieurement réellement ne reproduisez le système Fiat ce serait dommage et pire encore dans un protocole décentralisé avec des retentissements nous qui impacteront
Imagine a feature where you can click on a note and have stats displaying how far it has been propagated on a per relay basis. This would be useful for choosing between paid relays and maturing the zapvertising model.
น่าสนใจ 🤔 ซึ่งถ้ามันสร้างรายได้ไม่ได้ มันก็อยู่ยากนะ กับผู้ใช้งานไม่เท่าไหร่ แต่กับผู้พัฒนาที่เอาเวลามาใข้กับสิ่งนี้นี้สิ nostr:nevent1qqsq4el9yg8v5xt4qw6cvvnkjs0ey3ux9mw9sv6gtp56kzhd7axulugpzpmhxue69uhkummnw3ezuamfdejsyg9euaj5dwsxg4hdxqweu54uf8ay3ec2d0ezs2l85xh899rkzgprmspsgqqqqqqs4h88ft
Running relays does not cost much compared to client development costs or relay development costs. But yes there should be an economy starting for things to be sustainable in the long run. Right now a dozen (for the sake of decentralization) 20$ / month machines can carry nostr. Maybe add couple 30$ "historical" relays to keep the old notes and that's it. There are not many notes. "Zap sharing" was done by snort and I got some zaps from there. Cool feature. I think relays should adopt freemium/premium model. What do you think? nostr:note15947mqx873lm5ldyh8xcpra6p9f94rmp2ad2wjzg7zuyd6j66h3ssxlukv
The only problem with freemium that I can see is spam. Eventually when nostr is popular, relays that are free will waste a lot of operator time in un-winnable spam combat or be a nuisance to users.. I'd like to see clients normalize paid relays as part of their onboarding, even if the client themselves has to pony up the initial sats.
Read this. And then go sign up for @relaying. I did. Great product, and it functionally beats what I could hope to achieve on my own. nostr:note1ptn72gswegvh2qa4sce8d9qljfrcvtkutqe5skrf4v9wma6delcs5dxga6
Relying on zaps for support creates a very toxic atmosphere actually. I’d rather everything on Nostr require payment than have it run on donations that never arrive and people get resentful
Personnellement je ne suis pas pour l'approche du zap pour des créateurs oui pour le reste c'est bon quoi on n'est pas chez Meta insta face pour recréer des abrutis du cerveau l'argent facile sans user des neurones il n'y a plus abetissant pour le cerveau de l'homme idem pour certaines espèces en vases closes autant qu'ils le fassent dans les téléréalités . Afin de soutenir des projets il serait utile que nous tous serions participants et non à la subjectivité trop relative qui finit par nous mener vers des travers que nous n'aurions jamais.. Rien que le Bitcoin il y a tellement de travers entre nostr et X qu'il commence à être dévié du projet cypherfunks avec tant de faux profils et d'imposteurs liés à notre part de cupidité humaine si nous ne demeurons Humbles .
Oui aux dons participatifs qui concernent cet environnement très communautaires sur l'entraide en cas de difficultés techniques non pour être l'armée du salut
@Colby aren’t you working on stuff like this? Sats for bytes?
nostr:note16z84vc2cj7yqpy6s6suuqls5ef2twmw0hyfddgux5xqkadszmr0s77g777 @TheGuySwann we’ve crafted a method to solve this very problem! It also comes with additional trust-minimization for content delivery over Lightning, beyond helping relay managers earn more than their operating costs. https://www.hornetstorage.com/bitstream
I don't have the technical skill or knowledge to implement any coding regards creating applications for nostr. But I have come across this phenomenon before in my offline life, especially in the environmental/permaculture world. "Things should be free because that's fighting the system/capitalism." Sorry but no, my time and the time it took to acquire my knowledge come at a cost. One solution could be for a subscription model with a relay to be free if it hosted a txt note. A monthly subscription on a scale for hosting notes with images and videos or to unlock other features. Its voluntary and still allows for competition to define the best and most useful features. Will that's my 21 sats worth.. 😁
Et vous n'êtes pas le seuls nous sommes nombreux au niveau compétences techniques, pensez à modèle de tutorat payant ou non pour les novices non dotés de compétences informatiques
Welcome to open source! :) Free and free confuse a lot of people, both devs and users.
Personally, I'd like to see paid relays make the experience better in a way that naturally monetizes. Example: I own a hypothetical relay that filters out bots. You insta-reply within milliseconds with the same regurgitated "air drop" bullshit, my users don't see your replies. Because it cost you nothing. You want your airdrop message to fall on deaf ears anyway? There'll be an incremental cost of business to do so. By applying a cost to the "advertising" that's already going on, we both diminish its frequency and provide a revenue stream. Users get a better experience. Relay gets paid. *Great oversimplification, I'm sure.*
#zapvertising where did that go? I rather liked it nostr:nevent1qqsq4el9yg8v5xt4qw6cvvnkjs0ey3ux9mw9sv6gtp56kzhd7axulugpzpmhxue69uhkummnw3ezuamfdejsyg9euaj5dwsxg4hdxqweu54uf8ay3ec2d0ezs2l85xh899rkzgprmspsgqqqqqqs4h88ft
The idea of paid relays seems like a good idea, but here is a problem: suppose in the future the number of nostr users reaches millions and the number of notes reaches thousands of millions of notes, in such a situation, what is the cost of run and maintaining a relay? I don't think anyone can offer a free relay in this situation. As a result, I think that nostr will move towards paid relays in the future, but won't the paid relays lead to the centralization of nostr? Most users try to choose the best relays and the best relays will be the biggest relays. As a result, we may have a few large premium relays in the future that act like a bitcoin pool and censor users' notes if they want to.
I love this note. I've lost sleep over this issue since I joined nostr and it's the main reason I diverted my degree to researching nostr. I also love the fact there's no clear answer to this issue. We get to try different solutions and learn by trial and error. The interoperability makes the market through which users show preference. May I ask you @TheGuySwann , which revenue structure do you think is most likely to get a client to sustainability?
I have been testing a zap-per-feature model where people donate when we release new features. If we don't release anything, "we don't get paid" :) It's actually not bad, considering how small Nostr is right now. But I know most people only consider "monetization" if it is recurring an "automated". Which is a very Silicon Valley/Venture Capital way of looking at it. Nostr companies trying to monetize are doing it in the wrong way: holding keys, closing the code, selling data, attaching paid/closed services with their clients, centralizing caching/relays, putting ads, getting a share of transactions, etc. IMO, those are all terrible ways (incentives are not aligned with users) and only serve to alienate their users against them.
One question, if someone spends time to make content ( for example, a video) , they would post it on YouTube or Twitter to make money ( ads), they won't put it on Nostr because they don't make money on Nostr. People can zap and tip and donate on Nostr, but it is not much and not make money forever as on youtube because of ads. If there are no ads on nostr, people will make no money, nostr will not attract hundreds and billions people to put Content on nostr. No ads, no money, no users, it is that simple. Money decides everything. But to attract companies to display ads on Nostr, we have bot issues on Nostr, companies don't want bots to view their ads, only humans can buy products. So, to me 2 issues: ability to attract companies to display ads and prevent bots. Solving these 2 issues will scale Nostr.
Makes sense. Which one are you building?
If its for free than you are the product or the service might not survive! I would definitely pay for relays but the value proposition is not clear enough for me as a regular user. Relays are a mess right now. I have no clue which ones to add in order to read relevant content for me and having the best ones to share mine... From a user perpesctive it would also be nice to have an aggregation service to pay one amount which will be allocated to all relevant relay services...
Id like an easy way for me to see at the end of a month. ... - how much time spent in app - per relay, data rx/tx, event count read/write - per file serving domain, data rx, and files read and have integrated ways to send sats to each of those type of entities, whether i have a paid subscription to relay or not. peoples consumption and value attained differs and having objective data helps in applying sats to the unseen nostr:nevent1qqsq4el9yg8v5xt4qw6cvvnkjs0ey3ux9mw9sv6gtp56kzhd7axulugppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0qgstnem9g6aqv3tw6vqaneftcj06frns56lj9q470gdww228vysz8hqrqsqqqqqpy9unk5
This would be a great premium feature set. Would totally pay for this and there’s a lot of other cool analytics and simple features that could be offered for premium users without a huge base cost increase.
Nostr won’t be able to scale in a decentralised way. Centralisation will come.
"i must externalize all my costs. i must be business minded and growth oriented in my thinking. people will only recognize the value of my offerings if i put a price tag on it." nostr:note1ptn72gswegvh2qa4sce8d9qljfrcvtkutqe5skrf4v9wma6delcs5dxga6
I totally agree! I think it's also important to invite businesses to participate here on Nostr. I had the option to launch the Seed Oil Free Club on Twitter, but chose to launch it here instead where I actually own my social graph. Not only can relays and other infrastructure be profitable here, but other businesses can be too!
If you make me pay to use Nostr I'm out, simply because I will never figure out how to pay. I'm sure you can live without me being on Nostr, but I'm also pretty sure mass adoption will never happen If you make people oay for using it.
Monetizing relays is not “making Nostr inaccessible unless you pay.” I think you misunderstand the bigger picture here. Read some of the thread, there are a ton of great ideas and no one is talking about making it so new users can’t join and start exploring and commenting for free. You are completely correct on that point, it would relegate this space to a tiny group, which would defeat the purpose I laid out above, is how do we *avoid* that. In that sense, I’m hoping for thoughts and feedback on how we can find this ecosystem, *without* the barrier you correctly identify.
What is your opinion of a hybrid system? Some relays could be free, others advertising sponsored and other paid by users for access to specific info or ad free notes.
Free Relays owned and operated by ad companies and data farms would thrive. It's their business to gather intel so why not host and serve it in order to obtain? That's the point. I think you only have to pay when you get cancelled or censored. Let others get dirty hands. Free relays should be pitching to these people! https://thesocialshepherd.com/blog/top-advertising-agencies-uk
I would expect that people who make money on Nostr will be interested in a good infrastructure. So if McDonalds sells burgers on Nostr they maybe want to make sure that there are some working relays. There could also be some enthusiasts like the people on the fediverse right now. Third option I see are payed premium relays which offer special services.
From what I’ve heard in my thread, making contributions transparent, where they go to the right people with no thought or effort on the users end, and premium services, are really what users are interested in atm. I think just the first part of that would help a lot of us get out of the red at least.
There’s also a bigger picture here. Your “free” Internet accounts on Facebook, Twitter etc are not free, you are the product. Google, Amazon, Netflix, Apple own your data and your accounts you have on their systems are their accounts, not yours. On contrast, this is my relay with MY data on it, I make it available for others to see, but it’s my account and my data. I hold the keys to my npub and nobody can take that away from me. If I didn’t own my relay, then I should pay a tiny amount of money to use somebody else’s relay. Not a large corporate, but a person like you or me who’s using their own money to run a computer for their or others use. https://image.nostr.build/fc878150710ea83e7071241eb50621fffe6160dd45376a914734a2a773af7e03.png
I second that. Especially as setting up the nodes is so damn easy with tooling like umbrel. I guess it's still a lot about awareness. People need _really_ to understand that they are already paying for the services they use (but not in monetary units) it might be easier to help them in the migration away from it. We will need something like "here is an easy solution to self-host" or "here is an even easier solution to pay other relays to make it worth their while" https://image.nostr.build/441b84dd5db666f94888b0f36189f493320cd62a991e41c6e96e58822b57c061.png
I look at everything from a business perspective first. The problem with society is that few of us are "all around athletes wrt to skills to run orgs" and most people have become vertical specialists with the goal of working for a big org that does all the other nitty gritty for you, like HR, marketing, customer service, payroll, etc. So you get highly specialized tech people who can do their job well, but don't think about product to market fit or how to deliver that, which actually takes multiple skills, beyond just coding, like branding, design, communications, etc. Not everyone can multi hat all of that unless you grew up in an environment that was like that (like I did), where multiple family members ran their own business operations. And some people who have been stuck in a vertical for the last 20 yrs of their life in a big org, can't think their way out of it. Its very difficult to unlearn habits once ingrained, it'll take another generation or people from less well established economies where all the resources aren't handed to them (like sub sahara) . Just my 0.02 Sats
Generalized experience comes from life. Specialized knowledge comes from schools at the expense of the former.
I am the author of Blowater client and here is my take 1. I will do it. I will monetize on Nostr. 2. Basic features of Blowater client such as DM will always stay free as long I can afford the development of it. 3. I will explore monetization in other areas such as premium client features(collaborative editing), premium relay features, zapertizing and e-commerce over Nostr. Right now our team is still working on the foundation and we haven’t even integrated zap yet. Last but not least, I don’t consider bitcoin the only true way of payment. I consider Nostr a good architectural pattern for SaaS and fiat payment will open door for many non crypto users. Whether they choose to opt in bitcoin is up to the community influence instead of a forced decision by developers.
I would pay for a service that would be easy to setup, and I wouldn't have to worry about relays, image/video storage etc. I would also like to have automatic copy of my own data. This should be however made as easy and automatic for me as possible. I would pay maybe up to 5usd/month if service was really good.
This is likely the result of "in-app" purchase "guidelines" of Google and Apple. nostr:nevent1qqsq4el9yg8v5xt4qw6cvvnkjs0ey3ux9mw9sv6gtp56kzhd7axulugpp4mhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mqzyzu7we2xhgry2mknq8v7227yn7jguu9xhu3g90n6rtnjj3mpyq3acqcyqqqqqqg52ncns
agree, relay model is clearly broken. beyond even the pure economics, there's also the question of risk - if you run relays, you're probably going to be the target of govt. actions if you're hosting/serving content deemed illegal so, all the risk, none of the reward? it feels like the protocol itself is naive and confused about the role of relays tbh and probably needs to evolve, which poses its own difficulties all of this makes it a "too hard to think about" bucket item for mostly "indie" developer base and that takes us back to the root - economics: feels like nostr is living off grants r/now and commercial viability isn't a priority maybe that's right state given the nascency of it all?
I agree that we need a clear path to financial sustainability. But zaps can also be a deterrent for some users. In some parts of the world, buying Sats without KYC is very difficult. So far nostr is fun and I like many users in nostr, but I have not yet seen any feature that makes it worth giving up personal info just so I can zap. The ecosystem needs paying / zapping users. And to get more users the apps need to offer values that the users want to pay for. I much prefer that users have the options to help either using zaps or/and fiat money. I happen to be technically curious, so I am learning to host my own strfry relay. It's been running for almost three weeks, but I still don't know how this is helping nostr or me, if at all. And I would like to see more newbie-friendly docs. I think it is useful to grow the user base.
None of these things are mutually exclusive. Finding a way to make larger specialized relays and clients with extra features and sustainable business models doesn’t exclude at all the plethora of free options or self hosted options. Just the opposite, they all make each other more valuable. I fully expect to see a huge variety of models over time, I’m simply not seeing much in the way of the “premium” or paid models that I think are critical to get robust and sustainable scaling.
Nostr is sustained by the thirst for freedom. The money will come in due time, but to focus on revenue would compromise what makes Nostr good in the first place.
I disagree on the second part, but agree with the first part.
It's simple. If companies pay to display ads on Nostr, mostly bots will view the ads, so companies are worries bots viewing ads not real people, hence nobody will buy their products. How can nostr verify a number a bot or a real human. No way to do this without government ID. Again, ID verification will make Nostr becomes Twitter, Facebook, etc. But without real humans, companies will not pay to display ads for bots to view and no sale for product. Bots are the core issue here. Nobody has solved this issue.
Yep I got a free 3 months
Pour combien s'il vous plaît nous les utilisateurs nous sommes perdus au niveau de qui relève de la gratuité ou non ..
