Good stuff! I think it would be great if there were even financial incentives (instead of disincentives) to run relays, because it could be profitable, instead of a cost burden. Then you would likely get more of them, which should be good for the network, and #Nostr would be even more uncensorable.
Discussion
Bingo. There's a perverse FOSS obsession that's hurting Nostr. Profit motive works. Bitcoin miners make money, why the hell wouldn't Nostr Relays?
Either directly as a percent of ad revenue.
Or by tokenization.
Subscriptions don't work on social networks though. So it can't be pay-per-use.
But relays are the key to the whole thing. Setting up a relay should be as easy as installing an EXE and taking 20 seconds of setup time.
Yeah, I've heard of the expectation of getting things for "free" as being part of the fiat, Web 2.0 mindset.
I'm no fan of a subscription model either, but I think I could get with a pay per use model, which I don't see as the same exact thing. Like if I want to read a particular article or note/post, I might be willing to pay for that with a micro-payment of a few sats, possibly. I'm not sure, though, because it hasn't really been tested, to my knowledge.
that's a negative on the toxicanization but subscriptions wth guys
i'm doing my bit to make this a thing anyhow... it's not in my current work exactly but i've got pieces in place ready to do a full authed DM based CLI that will enable paying for subscriptions and no out of band website bullcrap, 100% pure #nostr
also, pay per use on a prepaid basis can work, but it has to be fairly flexible, i haven't even started to actually make a measure of what traffic actually happens, would be good to actually have accounting of how much event data actually is pulled by a client per npub and figure out a scheme for making that work
the time based subscription is probably adequate but it could be purely data based