Oddbean new post about login | logout monetization of service provision that is enough reason to make it universally supported can't run this shit on donations for ever, unless you live in some la la land socialist theory of gift economy, like #v4v mostly sounds like most of the time
Someone wants others to read what they write, can't they pay for the servers instead of charging everybody who wants to read? You know webpages are basically free to read and have been for decades, the publisher pays for the server.
But sure, there may be use cases in which charging for reads is necessary. It's not helping to get that point across to just yell about clients that don't implement AUTH, as if implementing AUTH fixed anything by itself.
helps users of paid relays, which i am one so, full auth support makes it easier for me to do that... i still don't get full use of the filter.nostr.wine because i have to prod nostrudel to do it, it can do it, but it's still not following the protocol by doing it automatically for me and there will never be private relay clusters for business use cases without auth on the clients and none of the funders seem to see it as a priority, thus the woeful state of it yes, auth helps a lot of things... and privacy is one of them if the relay is trustworthy
auth will help relays avoid having to rate limit by IP address ( a terrible, horrible, and frankly useless method of fending off greedy connections). instead you can use your npub with auth, and either stay within a regular client usage tier, or pay more to go insane with queries. i do think most if not all relays will do this eventually, or theyll end up exactly like every website that blocks and captchas vpn connections. (even free relays)
fiatjaf hasn't even considered that clients could be configured to make a new key every auth request except for to paid relays also, defeating the privacy invasion angle completely and pointing back to the IP tracking problem
i just think he's in denial about the fact that relays are inherently trusted third parties, and reconciling that with the "free anti-censorship" features a relay requiring auth to post is not censorship, and without auth you still get an IP address, and if that's a VPN address spam from such a vector will blanket block all use in this way paying for use of a relay doesn't doxx you... that would require using a doxxable payment route and not using tor/vpn to access the relay so, ip/npub as ways to decide what will be stored and relayed are both inevitable mechanisms, and being against censorship does not also mean being against paying for the goddang infrastructure lol