Don't underestimate the amount of value that people will voluntarily contribute. Consider linux. Consider the entire open-source movement. There is plenty of high quality stuff built by people who ask for nothing in return, just because they have the time, capability, inclination, and desire to make the world a better place. There don't need to be many such people because what is built once scales to many users. You might see it as a dumb decision to work for free - but life isn't actually all that hard, and once you've solved the problem of 'not being poor' some people don't really aspire to get rich and given that life is meaningless anyways, would rather just do what is fun for them, like programming a nostr client.
Discussion
A lot of folks working on Linux are supported by companies that rely on Linux, though. They do something else that they can monetize, and they contribute to Linux and other OSS because (1) their business succeeds when Linux succeeds and (2) contributing is a badge of honor while not contributing might get them shamed—IOW, the culture of OSS expects/demands it.
How do we create/maintain the same culture for nostr? What business models will align incentives?
But that is not how linux started. And Bill Gates was certain (based on his capitalistic ideals) that it couldn't possibly succeed because there was no profit and therefore no incentive and therefore Bill Gates ignored it entirely to his detriment. The lesson should be that it is dangerous to be so convinced in our beliefs about how things work that we ignore what is actually happening in front of our faces.
I have no problem with people thinking about how monetary incentives could align with nostr. Nothing I'm saying is a counterpoint to that, it is a side point.
Sure. All I'm saying, and I think what Semisol was saying, is that pure altruism isn't enough. Developers have to eat, too. In the case of Linux, after the first 5 years Linus' own work was supported by a job at Transmeta, then later indirectly by other companies via funding of the Linux Foundation. IIRC, there was also a gift of some Red Hat stock when they IPOed.
It did not start that way. In the 90’s early 2000, Linux was used mostly by techies. Where will nostr be in 20 years?
Even in the 90s, contributions were happening as a side effect of Linux use by companies and big organizations. For example, the Ethernet drivers I used on all my servers in the late 90s were written by someone at NASA (probably as part of their work on Beowulf clusters). My company (an ISP) didn't write much code, but we gave modest $ support to open source projects, mirrored repositories, etc., because we knew OSS was crucial.
No question a lot of contributions came from people who worked in big companies and big government. But Linux adoption by those same companies was very small.