Yeah, this is hypothetically what differentiates Nostr from mail servers. Switching mail providers has the high cost that you lose your identity and have to start over, and so mail providers have a lot of sway over users. As it stands relays have no sway over users or their identity. You can jump ship to another relay whenever you see fit, so that’s promising
Discussion
And if you run your own private relay that your client cross-posts to, your follows and content comes with you.
What happen when we’ll have gigs of informations? Relays won’t be able to transfer it instantly and for free? Could be an Attack/issue if mass of people connect/disconnect relays, no?
Sorry if not pertinent, I’m not an engineer. :)
I can imagine having a relay that I pay to be a member. As a member it agrees to broadcast all my notes + notes of non-member users who are tagged in mu threads so that sufficient context is always stored for all my activity
This is a world I want to be in.
I think its the way to go, there’s multiple way to monetize nostr relays.
1. Monthly flat price with or without limitations
2. Free tier until a certain threshold than pay per note.
4. Per ressource use (bandwidth, storage, cpu, memory)
5. Number of followers (more followers = more broadcasting? )
Do you have more ideas?
The mention of more followers = more broadcasting is interesting. If one user has so many followers that their bandwidth alone is costing the relay more than the relay is getting from them, they might have to pay more to be broadcast. Opens up a whole discussion on whether the cost of bandwidth and compute should be covered by the creators or by their followers. I can imagine all sorts of different setups emerging quite naturally