Yes. That’s the thing isn’t it? What do we do about it. The issue as far as I see it, is social, not technological.

Nostr has the same problem that everywhere has. 99% of people are bad at planning. They want to have shiny right now for the money. They don’t want to pay for something they may or may not get in the future.

It took both Apple and Google years of time and billions of dollars to get where they are today. That’s why the 1% are rich. Risk tolerance and delayed gratification.

Relays and clients here are not financially feasible. People want it for free. So we’re already humoring the idea of ads.

The most popular Linux distributions are corporately supported.

So are all the biggest open source libraries and packages.

See the pattern here?

Society has to be willing to invest in itself before a societally free product will exist. I’ve been saying it for ages, including in my recent article. People really have no right to complain unless they are in the small minority of folks who actually fund these things with more than a pittance. Plenty of them are here, but there just isn’t a critical mass to support the work sustainably. We have 18,000 active weekly users (Nostr.band stat). Apple has 1.2 Billion people funding them. It’s a systemic problem.