Oddbean new post about login | logout 30-day free trial offer, and with weekly DM reminders to setup payment, is traditional. Just need to implement AUTH on a relay. @cloud fodder do you think that's a viable model? They could come up with a gazillion new npubs, to milk that, but each new one would have zero followers and that would be painful.
After 30 days you could just throttle it enough to eventually be annoying, and then block their npub after n months or whatever.
The Spotify model. They annoy you with ads into buying the subscription lol.
Yup.
They are free to use someone else's trial offer. 🤷♀️ They just can't use any offer more than once.
well, if it gets tied to npub and ip address, yep there will be lots of thinking happening i think because we are now blessed with the visitation of spammers which means nostr is winning
Any permanently-free relay will have to throttle or end up full of garbage and spam.
yeah, everyone is all of a sudden going to understand what me, cloudfodder, mazin and semisol have been saying for a very long time real world network conditions
Yup. They can't just scale up a free service to cover millions -- eventually, even billions! -- of people at peak performance. That's a ridiculous expectation. Free-to-use software can make sense. Write once, run anywhere. It's a document you can copy. Free-to-use services is literally not a thing.
yeah, nostr's architecture will make scaling large scale relay deployments easy too, probably can build em out of lots of small relays with relay coordinator/proxies around them
The updated filter.nostr.wine is extremely fast for me. They must have servers spannung the globe, or something. theforest.nostr1.com is also extremely fast
there can also be free limited trials and people can beg and earn their subs
Might be a way to work for a relay, as well. 🤔
well, contributing data in some way can have value, telemetry could give you a better tier than limited free level
An easy one would be feedback. Fill out a survey or bug report once per month to renew access, and that helps the developers and operators stay on top of things.
yeah, this would be a great way to get testers too, would be a big thing for a project that combines a client and relay together as an integrated package... primal is already going in this direction but i think i may be involved in such a project in the near future, fingers crossed (we want to do a slack/gsuite killer) initial reactions to the idea of infrastructure all being paid have been very indignant at first but they will all get it when they have to take down their free server because it's suddenly costing them a lot and the penny might actually drop
Free trials ain't free for the seller. There's a significant amount of work that goes into verifying npubs worthiness to a free trial, besides the cost of the trials itself. And then we're right back in CaPtChAs territory etc. I prefer focussing on the UX of: - Onboarding people you know, with gifted cash to spend, in communities where zaps fly - Facilitating P2P Fiat 🔄 Cash
Even with AUTH and throttling? 🤔 We don't have to verify that someone is human, after all, since bots can pay for relays.
Yes, good point. Auth + Rate limit = Great. They might be good enough for quite some stuff. But "Worthiness of a free trial" translates into "Likelyhood of using it paid" real fast when you look at products/services that are social, like many Nostr things inherently are. Letting tons of people try out your Tennis club for free might actually be a great idea on a specific "Discount Day" or something like this. But you don't ask your paying club members to invest time and energy into a bunch of new people aaaaaall the time. I've lived that life for a while in an ecovillage and it's bad UX. My guess is that, just like for those real-life examples, you don't simply let people in without some sort of skin in the game.
I think that makes sense for custom or community relays, but the generic social media ones are going to find it tough because they have no target group. They're probably going to have to link relay usage to their client, somehow. I guess that's why Bluesky went invitation-only.
You're right about constant, free trials on public relays being a burden to current customers, tho. Creates npub churn. You always see that effect when we have the onboarding waves and then everyone emotionally invests in welcoming newvbies and then most of them disappear again. Wears down the welcoming enthusiasm, with time.
Y'all KWIM? We need to get better at targeting and concretely onboarding the high-potential users, or we're going to exhaust and demoralize the welcomers and waste relay and dev resources. We're too inefficient and the offer isn't differentiated enough. We need more tiered pricing models, for instance, so that people see that they can upscale and get better service, rather than only offering low-scale service to everyone for free. nostr:nevent1qvzqqqqqqypzphtxf40yq9jr82xdd8cqtts5szqyx5tcndvaukhsvfmduetr85ceqydhwumn8ghj7argv4nx7un9wd6zumn0wd68yvfwvdhk6tcpr3mhxue69uhhg6r9vd5hgctyv4kzumn0wd68yvfwvdhk6tcqypxrkmllsleme3n0wpf6qw62f45x6utl4ehq3apc6w837vmfs6eqxw4n8e4