Almost done with a long term event retention relay. Looking for feedback - what would you change?

Why?
- Most relays do not accept very old events
- Some relays periodically purge old notes
- Offline backups/private personal relays are not viewable by others
- Fiatjaf told me to do it

How will it work?
1. Add sats to your pubkey balance
2. Send notes to the relay (no created_at limits, upload data as old as you’d like)
3. As our relay receives your notes it will charge your balance a pro rated annual fee per note (price TBD)
4. Your notes are stored and indexed by the relay as well as automatically backed up and available for rapid export at anytime.

Authorized delete requests are always honored and not charged.

This relay will be available publicly for anyone to add to their nostr client and query historical notes.


Is it only for events written by the author or also all notifications?


Only for events written by the author atm.

Could expand to include things that tag the author but not sure how pay-per-use would work for those.


Just bill to the paid p tag user. I have a lot of need for this.


I can for sure do that, but what stops anyone from spam tagging a user and running their balance down?


Are you charging per post? That could be a problem. But if it is just a monthly rate, it shouldn't be an issue.

Users will report spam when that happens, so you can delete the event from their account if you want.

If you want to develop relay UIs, I think a nice UI could really help people keep their relays organized with only the info they want.


Presume this only really works at scale with gossip model and unrestricted read access to those notes?


Is this the first relay with usage-based pricing?


I wanted to charge per event since everyone seems to ideologically want pay per use not monthly subscriptions. Monthly fee capped at some amount of notes is easier to manage though if that’s preferred.


Sorely needed


Correct, read access will be unrestricted. Part of your storage payment will basically subsidize the cost of others reading it.


I’m sure there have been other prototypes but I don’t know of any up and running.


Private relays SHOULD be viewable as long as you publish it in your relay list, either using nip05 or nip65.
Of course clients that do not suck will honor that gossip model and read from your relay.
I don't see #nostr really being decentralized otherwise.


I'd much rather have a fixed monthy/annual with the chain they are part of included. I wouldn't want mentions that aren't part of a  chain I didn't participate in.
Per note is feels unpredictable, like if a note blows up, it could burn through my balance pretty quickly and then I'm on the hook for a much higher annual amount if I want to continue using the service.


The way Mazin is doing, you would only store your own events in that relay. The replies to your event must be saved somewhere else.

But yeah, on "inbox" relays that will receive every reply to your note, I don't think a limit on the number of events makes any sense.


should be variable sats per note size in kb


Yeah correct, thats the challenge with doing it as pay-per-use.

This was intended more to solve the problem of “where do I send my 5 year old exit.pub tweets” then a personal inbox.

I could make individual inbox relays that users rent monthly that would stream everything tagged by their pubkey from our aggregator but thats a separate product.


I can certainly do this, but does it become overly complicated for a user to have any idea how much to deposit or what their expected costs are?


you can give an estimate based on the average, but it shouldn't be too complicated to check the size of bunch of notes and give an accurate value..


Almost done with a long term event retention relay. Looking for feedback - what would you change?

Why?
- Most relays do not accept very old events
- Some relays periodically purge old notes
- Offline backups/private personal relays are not viewable by others
- Fiatjaf told me to do it

How will it work?
1. Add sats to your pubkey balance
2. Send notes to the relay (no created_at limits, upload data as old as you’d like)
3. As our relay receives your notes it will charge your balance a pro rated annual fee per note (price TBD)
4. Your notes are stored and indexed by the relay as well as automatically backed up and available for rapid export at anytime.

Authorized delete requests are always honored and not charged.

This relay will be available publicly for anyone to add to their nostr client and query historical notes.


From: nostr:npub134lfcqtw0rwzpey20suye7gjxep2ts6lhqemp7c4zhxe8jsj24wqqzelwh