Relays are boring but the most essential part; their developers are literally getting paid next to nothing. Nobody even knows who made which relay and who they should pay for there relays.
Not good. We gotta come up with some plan. Any suggestions?
Discussion
idea: Relay runners/entreprenurs maybe should reach out to bitcoin companies to get advertisements on relay.
Have a Swan relay
Have a Wallet of Satoshi Relay
Have a Blockstream Relay
etc etc
This would advertise Nostr more than the relays as they would become relays.
I think here he meant we have to find a way to retribuite relays
if your relay has a lot of users I dont see why not allow for adverts. I dont think people would care that much as long as the ads aren’t too annoying to the user.
Personally I fucking hate ads
You prefer to pay a subscription or something then?
I prefer to run my own relay, that’s what I am working on
Thats my plan as well. Just thinking for public relays I dont mind paying or watching ads.
I’d rather pay than watching ads
Fair, if I was running a bitcoin company I would for sure take the risk paying to run ads on the most popular relay. As thats where a lot of potential customers are at.
Ohh I thought you meant WalletOfSatoshi should make their relays!! Sorry for misunderstanding
Yes, but you could just have a premium service from the public relay, where you pay to not see the ads. That would help fund the service for everyone else.
Foreground in more apps. Build in zap splits?
People need to run their own relays.
Why don't you also provide people marketplace to sell their relays? I mean, you already provide them options to make one. You also have nodeless, you can provide subscription feature.
You can also become their relay clients; they can log in using an extension. 🤯
Hmmm interesting idea. I've been working on giving an easy interface to manage your relay and I'm making relaying.io open source so many people can offer this service.
That means you will have all the components, you just have to put them together. Perfect!
I was thinking about something like a page with a registry and informations, like white pages, so that people can actually have better understanding on what a relay can offer.
Also talking like supporting nip01-03-07 is not that easy to understand, I also think that people shall educate themselves a bit, so on this relay site I think there should also be a nip glossary
Any information on running a big relay
I am thinking freemium. Relays may be free for basic usage but for more limits, storage, features they can accept zaps.
+1 for relays accepting zaps
Relay de-commidification. Relays should have specific content or be intended for a target audience if they want to be profitable. The name gets part of the way there, and some clients show relay descriptions, but yes, a relay marketplace or social graph analysis (find the relays your friends are on, like we have for the lightning network) are needed.
I couldn't agree more. We need a marketplace where they can describe their communities, and users can make informed decisions.
This way, we can truly build a community around relays. Have you ever thought about it I mean you already have a app store.
Yes, a lot, but graph visualization is not something I'm very good at, and I know very little about graph analysis. But it's one of those side projects that one of these days I'm just going to throw together.
I agree 💯, I’m advocating topographic discovery besides other things.
I am have data Jan gave me in neo4j, initially so that I can explore the structure and visuals. I intend to scoop more recent data and publish a graph of the network including relays and probably some pubkeys with large followings.
Later I hope to replace neo4j with memgraph and publish a much broader range of pubkey plus note traffic.
Will be using knowstr.io which I bought yesterday for the graph, also sitting on nostrmarketplace.com hd a few ideas for that including simply listing paid relays and some performance data, but I’m opposed to doing that at the moment as I’m worried about artificially kettling waves of users into a handful of big relays.
I would prefer an organic fabric, even with relays spawning and dying.
Relay costs are an issue and at the moment there is probably vastly more relay capacity than the network requires, especially at the edges. Lots of relays are under utilised.
Load balancing and revenue sharing might be viable but… how to do that without gaining control? Again, I would prefer organic fabric.
nostr needs a commercial solution for the back end. Bitcoin has this, nostr does not.
#note: this is only a late night side project for me. Not full time. More like 5-8 hours a week in a good week. I’m very much following nostr devs and thinking about stuff. I think nostr is very much pre-dawn with high turnover of devs and projects, but it continues to refine. I’m investing time now so that I’m engaged when it matters.
I'd really like a marketplace that gives the data (speed, uptime, how long it's been running) and "tos" ethics (removes csam, spam, malicious, yes/no nudity, etc),user ratings. If I was building, I'd want these easy to find options. I'd also zap to use well maintained relays personally.
Build a Relay Store.
Relays must have a way to advertise what they offer. Allow users the ability to compare and select ones they like, provide reviews...etc.
The ability for different groups to experiment with different strategies to address the very real problem you bring up is one of the strengths of nostr. I sometimes imagine that nostr is like IPFS except minus 90% of the cool but unnecessary complicated stuff, including the fancy schmancy kademlia network that connects all the relays I mean all the IPFS nodes together.
My point being that I think IPFS suffers from the fact that users are locked-in to things like kademlia that are cool, but suffocating. Nostr has done a good job avoiding that sort of trap. Just something to keep in mind when contemplating what to do about relays.
In the long run, we’d like it to be as easy as possible to start new relays. We need there to be no moat. That way, the efforts of the state or other powerful entities to capture and shackle the biggest relays will be fruitless, bc new ones will immediately pop up, and the market will hopefully have the tools to recognize quickly which ones have been captured and respond appropriately.
I imagine in a world like that, the business of running a relay would be pretty close to break-even.
And in a world like that, it might not be a good thing for relays to require building up a brand. Bc branding takes time and effort and expense, which would work against what I said above.
If we can ever get decentralized web of trust to live up to its potential, then our WoT will help us know which pieces of info (and/or which content authors) are worth paying for. In which case perhaps relays will become like informational wholesalers. Alice says she’ll pay x sats for whoever can deliver a file with a particular hash, and that becomes the relay business model. Maybe a few sats for a chunk of files. Whatever is enough to cover the costs of the relay.
Paid monthly subscriptions.
Two people respected in the community start an open collective, or something similar, and recieve donations. Ask opensats for a donation for relays. Relay operators can submit invoices for infrstructure, up to a certain limit, if they need help. The fund operators then pay or zap a % of the invoice. Relay operators are out stuggling and every little helps.
Damus has a really good relays menu. Also, nostr:npub1fyvwkve2gxm3h2d8fvwuvsnkell4jtj4zpae8w4w8zhn2g89t96s0tsfuk is really good, and while not inexpensive, definitely worth it to aggregate relays.
You pay for not being the product. Keeps the corporations and shitcoiners out of nostr.
Yes, I have a vision and a plan for relays, it's just taking 4+ months to execute. Full stack dev been hard for just one person but I'm hitting good pace now with the react and typescript. More source dropping this week.
nostr1.com
Good luck 🍀
I'm thinking something like a pay-to-post scheme (i.e. X amount of sats per note) might work. There should be a way to add something like a proof-of-payment to the event payload
I didn’t get any payment yet 🤤😹
My idea is to collect a small fee and then distribute that fee to relays, fronts-ends and to users (automatic zapping). The fee could be collected by either front-ends or relays in a decentralized manner, there could be a NIP standard how to do it and how to distribute it fairly.
я уже озвучл все.