There kind of is a business model for relays. Paid relays all over the place. But running your own relay is not resource intensive if it's only a handful of users or just your own. Nostr scales the same way BTC does. Running a relay is cheap, unless you want a large public relay with high availability. But even my relay, wheat, has about 40-50 whitelisted users but is public and anyone can write and read to it. (Non whitelisted users have their events deleted every 2 days) I self host it, and can run on a raspberry pi if I wanted to. But it's running on the same machine as my node, my website, and a handful of other apps. Unless my notifications are blowing up, it runs fine on half a gig of ram and takes about 100mb of storage.
Discussion
Yeah, I saw that there are paid relays out there. The market will find a way, but the less the users have to deal with the better. Nodes are simple/dumb by design, so designing a business model for them so they are all competing on the same metric (data availability) shouldn't be tough.
#Alexandria nostr:nprofile1qqsggm4l0xs23qfjwnkfwf6fqcs66s3lz637gaxhl4nwd2vtle8rnfqprdmhxue69uhhg6r9vehhyetnwshxummnw3erztnrdakj7qfqwaehxw309ahx7um5wghx26tww4hxg7nhv9h856t89eehqctrv5hsz5xkmf
GM. Yeah, we decided to tie specific relays from independent operators into our clients, as defaults. Users pay us and we pay the operators. If someone wants a custom instance of #Alexandria, our suppliers help them get their custom relay setup, and they then also pay the suppliers.
That way we carry the cost, and they can focus on the administration and security. We're using relays from nostr:npub10npj3gydmv40m70ehemmal6vsdyfl7tewgvz043g54p0x23y0s8qzztl5h and nostr:npub12262qa4uhw7u8gdwlgmntqtv7aye8vdcmvszkqwgs0zchel6mz7s6cgrkj.
And, of course, we encourage everyone to run a personal relay as a data store, like nostr-rs-relay or #Citrine 🍋 (for mobile). That way, they have their own archive and can use the functionality offline.
It makes a lot of sense to store your #ebooks on your phone or tablet, for instance.
Sorry, this is also me. Forgot to switch to my dev account, before posting. As usual. 🙄
Good morning☀️🫡! Hope your enjoying Easter. Also, I have a question: do you recommend leaving these blank?
They're filters. Depends upon what you want to save.
Aaahh, gotcha. Thank you! How's Easter going?
Easter Sunday was wonderful, and Mass this morning was pleasant, and then the Pope died.
I hadn't heard. Sorry, to hear that🫂. Honestly, I knew nothing about his impact on catholicism or anything related. Was he a good or bad pope, in your opinion?
Mixed. Like all popes. They are all human.
Guess that papal infallibility doctrine is taken with a grain of salt.
There's some really fun relics in official doctrine in my experience.
https://www.catholic.com/tract/papal-infallibility okay it looks like they've actually addressed some of the absurdity angle this otherwise would seem to present.
#GM FREN HAVE A FABULOUS 🌟 DAY TODAY
nostr:npub1z6f0tl9rgrd8g3t7zz5r9rtxpu3259vd0rlmwumw48fayxpj8xqsj0m2tv
Paid smart relays, such as algo relays. We have this model being worked on by nostr:nprofile1qqsw9n8heusyq0el9f99tveg7r0rhcu9tznatuekxt764m78ymqu36cpr3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujucnfw33k76twwpshy6ewvdhk6tcpzdmhxue69uhhwmm59e6hg7r09ehkuef0qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtn4w3ux7tn0dejj7ne6u4e.
Relay hosting provider relay.tools is run by nostr:nprofile1qqs8eseg5zxak2hal8umuaa7laxgxjyll9uhyxp86c522shn9gj8crspz9mhxue69uhkummnw3ezuamfdejj7qgjwaehxw309ahx7um5wgerztnrdakj7qgkwaehxw309a3x2an09ehx7um5wgcjucm0d5hsvlnggv
Why should note hosting be commoditized? Can it even be commoditized? Compare it to renting servers. There isn't a single market price to host a web app. Every host has its own features, pricing structure, free tier etc.
Same with relays. Why standardize income source? The default might be to pay to have your notes hosted, but you could just as easily have a format where a relay invests in scouring and indexing all kinds of posts, and users pay to have a curated feed of the best posts of the day, or maybe even a personalized feed. You could see relays that charge for notes on demand you can't find elsewhere where you give the note ID and pay them to get the note back. I even imagine there will be relays that hold on to notes that people request to delete and will charge to see them like a paid wayback machine.
Even in the most common case where relays charge to host your notes, they will differentiate on many factors such as $/storage, $/bandwidth, uptime, speed, hosting location, redundancy, censorship resistance etc. Hosting is not something that can be commoditized.
One thing for certain though, and it's biggest difference between your concept is the ad funded relays. I don't believe this can ever gonna be a significant part of Nostr and the best thing about it. It will be a thing when there is a company that builds out a full stack with a client that works with their own relays but even then it's not necessary for any standard protocol to pay for it.
The client side decides what the users see. It always has last say in that field. Therefore, any attempt to fund a relay with ads will be fought off by client side filters if it ever gains significant market share.
Here is the thought experiment we need!
* So clients and relays are not tied.
* Therefore clients actually control what a user sees.
Business ideas:
1. Subscription to relays/pay for premium client feature (current status e.g. #damus purple and premium relays)
2. Clients or Relays sprinkling adds
3. Promotion via zap sharing, e.g. each time a user gets zaps, that user’s primary relay gets a haircut. This would require cooperation and “trust” but content providers may go for it.
Nostr relays are highly decentralized because we have negentropy and outbox models. That means its easier to cover the running costs, for every relay that isn't especially large and overrun with users.
You can't actually see most relays, as they're just little apps running on people's cell phones or laptops. I run the #Citrine 🍋 relay on my Android phone, and it has hundreds of books on it, takes up only 630 MB of space and doesn't noticeable increase my mobile bandwidth usage, since I sync it when in WiFi. Probably costs me a few euro-cents per month, and contains the notes that are relevant to me.