You can't expect #Nostr protocol, client, and relays developers to work for free while also preserving everyone's digital autonomy.
It doesn't work that way. You have to choose one:
A: Freemium slavery.
B. Pay-to-play sovereignty.
Sovereignty is becoming a service unlocked by markets more than a right gauranteed by governments.
Freedom isn't free.
Agree! What’s the smartest and most systematic path for developers to be paid appropriately?
Through capitalism. By creating services that solves the markets problems by way of the market test: charging money for them at a sustainable rate.
Examples:
- private relays charging monthly or in a metered fashion
- clients charging in-app money for additional features
- protocol devs raising grants and donations
I agree these one time access fees will eventually become unsustainable. The rest of society can have their "everything is a human right" bs. This is the place for value for value.
Yes and no. I believe there wil always be Open Source Alternatives. But freedom with great usability will probably come with a pricetag. A pricetag that I'm more than willing to pay.
Time costs money. Servers cost money.
OSS is a matter of lockin; it's a separate issue.
True. But it can be cheap and high quality. And always a better deal than paying with your data.
YES!!! That’s why I zap hardest to the builders of this land of freedom🤙
That is definitely true, but we need better payment models on the internet.
I nearly quit watching YouTube entirely because of ads. Brave is amazing.
Paid subscription models are almost as bad. It feels fucking awful to pay a subscription that I don't end up using much. Micropayments via Lightning are a cool idea, but they still interrupt what you're doing, and if zaps are any indication, it's easy to pay a bunch of seemingly small payments and then choke when you realize how much you're spending.
I want a way to pay for data in real time instead of paying an ISP once a month. That payment can get sent to the relays that pass along the data, in real time.
I want to set a rate I'm willing to pay, and deal with the service people are willing to give for that rate, and never think about it again.
