If the Fediverse is reliant upon donations to keep instances running... they're NGMI.
Discussion
You think nostr will ever pivot to paid relays?
How are nostr relays gonna keep running in the long term? Seems like we have the same problem.
Would be nice to see a comparison of needed resources to run a #nostr relay vs a Fediverse instance.
As a nostr relay is technically much simpler, I guess it would be cheaper to maintain, specially in man hours.
PS: I know that replaceability of a nostr relay is a great feature compared to the complexity of migrating Fediverse accounts to another instance, but I would love to know the difference of OPEX between the two protocols.
Do you have thoughts on long term sustainability? This is the reason why the advertising slash data mining legacy system exists if people are unwilling to pay for the service.
Main reason nostr cannot scale, not enough passionate people to do it for free or at their own cost. It’s technical limitations make this a larger burden. They want to avoid P2P but scalability requires a large amount of autonomous processes. Scaling a non-p2p system requires more humans for more nodes. All human operated hub based peer systems have failed to date. Edonkey, etc… The human central point of failure is vulnerable, lawsuits etc…
Just like freedom, freedom tech requires work and sacrifice. The early founders of freedom tech here are doing that for all of us because of a belief in the importance of it. Thanks to them all.
IMHO, the rest of us should be forming local cooperatives of BTC mining, custody, and probably power production for the mining. Smaller communities make for more resilient social and economic structures.
Great post 🖤
nostr:npub12262qa4uhw7u8gdwlgmntqtv7aye8vdcmvszkqwgs0zchel6mz7s6cgrkj is now trying a subscription model for Eden and atlas relays. I think this is the correct and sustainable way going forward.
However, I think we need a better UX for this. Probably each client having its own relay and asking for a subscription in order to sustain itself. If the user decides not to pay, then he can still use the client, but won't have access to it's associated relay.
Not sure how Primal is doing it though. nostr:npub16c0nh3dnadzqpm76uctf5hqhe2lny344zsmpm6feee9p5rdxaa9q586nvr, do you plan on implementing such a system?
What if relays add support for ads only for the users that are not paying? It can also be incorporated at a protocol level, so that clients are also aware of each relay's ads (for better feed ordering) and maybe also report back to the relay impressions and clicks per each ad.
That way, relays could monetize ads from publishers only for people that are not subscribing. And the ads won't be targeted as they currently are on social media these days, because the relay doesn't know anything about each user's identity.