Genuinely curious here...
Paid relays... Worth it?
What do they offer that free relays dont?
#AskNostr
#Nostr
Discussion
I don't like the idea of paid relays and I don't think they're worth it.
You're welcome to use my free relay: wss://n.ok0.org
Most don't offer anything different than what relays like mine do for free.
Yes i will do, thank you!
Out of curiosity you run it out of goodwill and i suppose people donate zaps for the effort?
I run it because I can and I've got the resources to do it. It really doesn't cost me anything and I don't rely on donations at all.
What I get out of it is the success of Nostr and the guarantee that nobody will censor me and my frens. A relay that nobody uses is useless, so I want people to use it.
The idea is to make spam costly by requiring some amount of sats when publishing something to a paid relay. Connecting to paid relays should in theory reduce spam on your feed.
Except it doesn't unless you also remove free relays, which effectively gets you to isolate on a small network island.
Most free relays have some kind of spam mitigation, as do clients. In fact, Spam is mostly tackled client-side.
From what I understand, some people prefer the coziness of a smaller ecosystem. Some relays offer screws to newer features. Some are significantly faster than most other servers.
Paid relays aren't a scam. They are also figuring out how to scale for things like video hosting.