Nostr Web Client

There's just too much downside to the gardens with fences of 'paid' relays, is all I'm saying. Pay to post is the same if there's no option to post for free, like once every hour (reactions not included, maybe).

Proof of Work solves this and lets you verify its not spam without any of that.

Let's not be greedy for a monetization system. We need it to be engineered for freedom first. I don't have any doubt, people will voluntarily run software they believe in and that provides the world with a public good, without needing to be paid.

Solving spam without building fences is what we should focus on, not pushing people to pay for access to the gardens.

jleger2023 2y ago 💬 1

And who pays the bills for the people running the servers and writing the code? If you find value in something, be willing to pay for it. It doesn't have to be expensive, but everyone needs to do their part. There's no such thing as a free lunch.

I personally am not content to sit back and let other people pay for the things I use so I can get it "free", because I know it's not really free. Putting somebody else in control in that way results in what we already have: a warped social landscape where narratives are driven by the people that bought and paid for it. *We* need to be the ones that have bought and paid for it because that lets *us* set the narrative -- our own narrative.

That's my opinion. I'm open to other ideas and how we can make things accessible and better for all, but ultimately the people using the service need to be the one paying for it or we're back to a top-down model that wrecks the common person.

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Discussion

₿i͎t͎c͎o͎i͎n͎ ✶ 2y ago 💬 3

Sounds like a free rider problem.

It has to be a cheap enough solution that the majority of the population can join but it has to cost enough that it is a barrier so smammer can't afford to spam..

All while, you have to make it simple enough for the masses.

That's where the relay problem comes into play. It's too confusing for the masses. I don't understand what half of these relay buttons do on Amethyst. I've seen the question asked multiple times but never seen it answered.

I've signed up for a paid relay but not sure of the full benifits of that are.

jleger2023 2y ago

I agree. We have a lot of work to do to make everything simple and easy for the average user so it's not confusing. If people want the benefits they need to put a little effort into learning how things work (just like they had to do with their cell phones and the Internet), but the devs should do our absolute best to make that learning curve as small as possible.

Roaming 2y ago 💬 1

What if clients start to be small relays themselfs? Is this technically possible? This way everybody using it contributes. Something like what ipfs does with files.

jleger2023 2y ago

That's certainly possible for a peer to peer network as opposed to the current federated relay network. I'm in favor of that for clients that replace apps like WhatsApp. But devices like phones don't have the CPU or bandwidth to handle what relays are doing for the general social network. P2p also has poor performance in comparison, so pulling down large feeds like people do now would be a bad user experience. But again, I'm all in favor of a Nostr-driven WhatsApp replacement!

⚡A C V⚡ 2y ago

Proof of Work was originally meant to solve this problem, not the Byzantine Generals problem of transaction finality across decentralized participants.

It was a spam prevention proposal. Require someone prove they're a normal user with limited activity by doing a quite large amount of work that wouldn't bother a normal person making 1 post per minute or so. The problem is that this seems to be a phone first ecosystem and work is hard on a phone's battery.

⚡A C V⚡ 2y ago 💬 1

100% agree - but voluntarism is a part of the value4value ideology, I believe.

Pay after you get the value, not in anticipation of it. If we require payment up front, before a good UX is witnessed, that's not value4value. That's just subscribing to a service that may provide value, you don't know until you try it.

Trust that people want to support all of this, they've just never had a means to do so. Subscriptions don't win, as seen in the current web. Subscriptions provide you with access to a limited garden of suspect value.

Let's just admit spam is one problem and support/funding the actual costs are another.

jleger2023 2y ago

I agree that volunteering is a good thing for things you believe in, and I agree that letting people try-before-they-buy also works well in many situations. Clients could certainly let people give it a try before asking for payment. Relays, however, probably not -- spammers will just sign up and spam during the free period, then we're back to whack-a-mole problems.

I also agree that spam and funding are two different problems, but there's a vin diagram there with a lot of intersection between the two. I don't believe one will be solved without the other.