I just cannot imagine monetization on Nostr yet. Most people aren't used to pay, to store their data. You can reason as much as you want, they will still prefer the 0-cost alternative.

And with the number of "premium" relays growing, many users will find themselves locked-out.

Can't we come-up with some sort of network funding? Where ultimately ~5% of the users, pay for 100% of the infastructure? A bucket, that's split among relay / proxy and storage operators, based on the capacity they provide (and process).

Sourcehut does something like this.

https://void.cat/d/85xNGYpnkg45FzKpasvFLa.webp

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Interesting idea. We are considering all options for how to do this with www.purplerelay.com but nothing like free seems to work for most people.

Free is certainly easiest for on-boarding.

Imagine you had to pay, to get a Bitcoin wallet. Doesn't really make sense technically, but the idea is the same. Of course Bitcoin has it's own incentives, for both user and operator (miner, nodes).

That’s how we grew Coin Wallet. 20M wallets later we have business.

Ppl crying ibwent all free.. haha i aint paying for no relay and dam sure aint paying for no client. Some are to pussy here to say this but i aint paying for shit haha

Fair enough

how are they going to find themselves locked out, makes no sense

Well, if Twitter charges $10 for access, not paying $10 means no access. Same applies to relays - not sure what's not clear about this?

What's the justification of a premium relay, if there's 1000 other "free" relays that behave the same, and don't require payment?

you're essentially answering your first question here with your second question

there's always free relays available

or am i missing something?

I think it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem, which centralized social media solves with advertising.

Msybe I'm asking the wrong questions.

What incentive is there, to run a premium relay, among free relays? Would someone pay for the identical Facebook experience, when someone else is getting it for free? Premium might imply "faster" or "more available" but Clients by design connect to 10 or 20 or more relays, so it shouldn't even matter if half of them are "faster".

And you're right, "locked-out" is meaningless, unless the premium relay has content, which cannot be shared to another relay (not sure how that would work, unless the majority agrees not to re-post premium content).

yea i dont understand it either.. im ok.. for now 😂

rarely on global anyway

Not being on global is a shitcoin ;)

what why😆

everything else is a bubble ;)

i like my echo chamber, it's cozy here

The market will sort this out. There will be higher quality paid options (still pretty damn cheap) and lower quality "0-cost" options where you pay with your analytics/time (think youtube ads e.g.).

I don't really think this is applicable here

1. The basic idea is, that the user shouldn't have to think about Relays. There may (and frankly should) be thousands of relays, all of which distribute a portion of content. Having premium / non-premium relays, just means complexity for users, and lower reach for .. users.

2. There's no way to ensure that a relay doesn't track you. In fact, given that all of your data is public, most of the tracking can be done by anyone, so there's no real incentive not to get tracked.