Greg White, [Aug 22, 2023 at 5:25:31 PM]:
🤔 interesting question.
I don’t know if anyone running a relay is running it at a profit, but I haven’t run one publicly so I don’t know how many adopters you need to make it so.
Most clients I’ve seen only support a “fee to join” model which means you need endless new users to make it work.
What you really want is like a monthly thing, or a “per post” charge but I’ve not seen anyone implement that yet. nostr:npub1gcxzte5zlkncx26j68ez60fzkvtkm9e0vrwdcvsjakxf9mu9qewqlfnj5z is working on more robust relays though I think.
It’s not a terrible hassle if you use relaying.io but that’s contributing to centralisation of relays (to that one provider). But better to have more relays, it’s still a step in a good direction.
It’s non trivial to run it yourself unless you’re very comfortable with AWS, Digital Ocean, or something similar.
What other questions do you have?
Overall relays need more dev investment or Nostr will struggle. I’ve seen the count of active relays decline by a lot over the last month on the ones I’m tracking on https://relay.guide.
Risks… what if someone tries to publish CP or some other horrible content?
For this reason I’m thinking it would be read-only for subscribers which would protect us from bad actors.
And I agree… relay centralization is a big risk. And it seems no one is supporting relay operators which has me concerned for the future of the ecosystem.
Here’s a good primer on the legal requirements of running stuff like relays https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/12/user-generated-content-and-fediverse-legal-primer
When it comes to CP: legally you there are steps you can take to absolve the operator of a lot of responsibility.
One of the things is to force anyone posting to the relay to agree to a terms of service. I haven’t seen a relay implement this in any way besides publishing the TOS as part of the relay metadata.
If law enforcement alerts you to content that should be taken down then you need to do that or face consequences in that jurisdiction. But that’s all reactive. That’s why it’s wise to publish real contact info in the metadata of the relay as to who is the admin so you can respond to requests.
Morally it’s a different story. There are no good content moderation tools for relays and none on the way that automate it in a way that would make it a hobbyist level time commitment to contain the issue on a moderately active relay.
It’s a challenge I’ve been thinking deeply about and hope to connect with nostr:npub1yye4qu6qrgcsejghnl36wl5kvecsel0kxr0ass8ewtqc8gjykxkssdhmd0 about at some point because I have some ideas that would make it lower effort on the relay operator side, but still cordon off relays that don’t block known sources of CP or other content that’s illegal or despicable.
Read-only for subscribers? That would mean subscribers couldn't write to the relay, right? And can't anyone, even non-subscribers read from any relay, anyway?
Not sure… just thinking out loud here. And i don’t think anyone is doing it yet, but I remember reading about different models including putting content behind paid relays.
The more friction the better.
