If Nostr succeeds, relays will need viable financial models (e.g., user fees or data monetization). As profitable businesses, relays would then be incentivized to maximize, not limit, note volume. IMO
Discussion
As long as the fediverse offers free servers why would anyone pay to use a nostr server?
We need a donation model.
There is no such thing as “free servers” once you scale, whether it’s fediverse or nostr.
I said donation model. And free from the users perspective.
IMO there is opportunity to compete with CloudFlare and AWS here, with additional services provided along-side the relays.
Quality is often worth more than quantity
No matter the solution consumers will need to pay some portion or else we end up with the same perverse incentive structure as the advertisement model.
With ads the consumer isn’t the paying customer so the service provider’s incentives aren’t aligned with those of the consumer. That led to monetizing the consumer’s attention and a meteoric rise in essentially surveillance tech.
We need to align all interested parties.