maybe the square itself, but you certainly want the cafes, bars and bakeries in that square to be real businesses, earning enough from sales to pay their staff, pay the rent, and eek out a small profit.
a town square where every cafe, bar and bakery is free of charge for everyone and being subsidised to the tune of millions by certain benevolent groups sounds a little not-quite-right no?
good analogy
but I maintain that the clients are the square, the cafes are people selling stuff, either goods unrelated to Nostr or extra optional services to improve the Nostr experience
You could argue that I suppose, but then who is doing the subsidising? For a real town square it's still the townspeople paying, it's still their tax contributions. For nostr the current user base is not covering any significant part of the costs of providing what it is consuming, in any way, roundabout or direct. The whole thing is run on a Deus ex machina plot device.
If you're not paying for your use then you are the product, always and forever. At the moment most people on nostr are not paying for their use and therefore ARE the product. The only question is to whom are they selling themselves.
The answer is they are selling themselves to a relatively small group of people looking to make a certain mark on the world, to leave a certain legacy. If enough in this small group give up this quest (this can be a mercurial sphere) then they will be left with nobody to sell themselves to.
in the beginning developers were paying it with their own free time
many still do now, many run relays for free, do all sorts of things for free, because that's humanity, that's how the wonderful universe of open-source software was created in the past 20 years
but opensats and hrf and others have put money on the table too, is there an issue with that?
I agree that having everything funded by grants distorts incentives and ends up attracting some wrong people
but having real corporations running clients for profit is much worse
The problem for me is the scale of the subsidies. As far as I can tell, it's over $1m per month going in, perhaps well over. And for a user based with under 10k daily actives (going by npub.world). That's $100 per daily active per month, or thereabouts.
If it was a little bit of help here and there then I'd be fine with it, but this is something else entirely, these are Saudi Arabia ratios.
I think small businesses running clients for profit is fine and good, just as it's fine and good to have small businesses running bakeries and bars. One good thing about nostr is that it potentially enables small businesses to take part in an industry previously reserved for corporations. But like any small business they still have to function as *actual business* for the whole thing to work. That hasn't been proven out.
you make reasonable points
