Oddbean new post about login | logout Back when we started 🍷 nostr.wine, I signed up to basically every paid relay that existed at the time (20+). I think only 3 of those still exist today. It’s easy to turn a relay on and collect payments but it takes effort and a plan to keep it running reliably for years. nostr.wine isn’t going anywhere 🫡 nostr:note1qm6l4lz7jfj2akjtwc6fv9wj9y5753q7sdxvyaspxy48dhlqvf9sft73pm
Paid relays die more often than free ones.
Yes! Because if you’re taking payments from users you (should) feel more obligated to keep it online/functional. You’re more likely to shut down a paid relay if you no longer have time/interest in dealing with it or if it’s costing you money. People who choose to run free relays have a more set it and forget it mentality. It has tradeoffs but they tend to stick around longer because they aren’t as short term profit/break even motivated.
why do i not need to pay to keep using nostr.wine tho?
Our plan was to subsidize nostr.wine with our other services (most notably filter.nostr.wine) and so far it has worked well. If some day this isn’t sustainable we’ll change it.
well i get problems using filter so i stopped paying...
What kind of problems? I’ve been using exclusively filter to access any non nostr.wine relay for 2 years!
mainly that it doesn't give me anything more than using nostr.wine which i paid the initial fee for, and it gives me hassles with client auth - i mostly use coracle these days, but... and that's why i'm saying, i'm not sure your model is viable
So no problems? It gives you way more than nostr.wine, not sure why you think that. Have you read the readme? I get more than 75% of the notes I consume through filter exclusively, most users don’t pay for paid relays…
yeah, no problems but no perceivable benefits either should i just remove nostr.wine and use only filter.nostr.wine?
We usually tell people to use both since nostr.wine has regional mirrors and is faster, but notes do propagate to both so you can do that if you want. There are benefits but they require performant clients (that don’t just connect to whatever relays they want) otherwise you won’t notice. If I run Damus or Amethyst and use only nostr.wine/filter.nostr.wine the speed is genuinely unreal compared to pulling the same notes from 10+ public relays. Try this for a week and see how quick it is. After that check your battery use + data consumption. And all that is before you even use the built in (optional) WoT to browse global of 10+ large free relays (not all clients provide WoT out of the box).
as a nostr wine/filter customer it did speed up Amethyst to near instant, and Coracle to pretty fast. Primal is still really slow, but maybe that because it has other filters in there. i just downloaded NOstrudel yesterday and it also seems fast. but i makes me hungry for pastries everytime i click on it so, i'm back to Amethyst