Paid relays cannot be a primary way to solve spam. If that becomes the case, Nostr is as good as dead.
Discussion
I never said that is the case. but I am currently building spam filtering and discoverability infrastructure for nostr.land
if people want it for free, I will be setting up a donation page where they can cover the costs of a free-to-use API
infrastructure costs money to run and maintain, and without some sort of funding model (hoping people donate, free labor, ads, etc.) it cannot exist
and I decided that I do not want to do free labor because people want me to
Asking people to pay for a usable experience before they've experienced the value of the network is a really hard sell. If Nostr can't overcome that, it will be tough to #grownostr.
But maybe that's ok. Maybe Nostr isn't the next Facebook. Maybe it's the next Mastodon: a set of protocols and clients and sites that has enough center of gravity to keep certain communities together and sees spurts of growth when other networks shed users. I wouldn't regard that as dead or failure.
