Dad and other Dad are fighting again ππ
Discussion
Seriously though, relay operators are going to be unimpressed if they see a drastic rise in storage.
I imagine free public relays will block the event type by default. You'll need a paid or self-hosted relay to use it because of the cost. Which is perfectly fair tbh.
That's what will end up happening. If this catches on, we'll see specialized relays or paid relays offer NIP-95 with higher pricing tiers.
I'm already building this into a relay to bootstrap NostrFans.
That relay will then be readable to subscribers only.
Writable by the content creators only.
Now we can control what relays images stay on, the content will stay limited to paid subscribers.
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How are you planning to scale that? How many users one meager server can support? How are you planning to adopt you media to the clients form factor and bandwidth constraints? πΆπΎπ«‘
I've already got multiple content creators interested.
Tradfi hates to serve the adult industry so a lot of those models are already familiar with Bitcoin payments.
I can take a percentage of subscriptions to cover server costs and even directly pay for the VPS in BTC. Can simply upgrade the VPS as needed.
Known fact, one server never scales! Known fact, creator is not consumer of their own media. Know fact, everyone uses the clients and hardware they like. Every adult site now uses CDN, videos are reencoded and optimized on the server. Videos are chunked and streamed to the client from closest POP and only what is watched, with small buffer! πΆπΎπ«‘
Known fact: there's a large overlap between guys who pay camgirls and nerds who like using Bitcoin π
I have ideas for spreading between servers. Most obvious one is using a load balancer.
I can use Cloudflare to cache media through a CDN.
On enterprise plan, yes! Will cost you from $2.5K a month. Otherwise you will be blocked! πΆπΎπ«‘
They have a separate video streaming plan. Starts at $5/m.
I am very aware of that. That works only if you store video on their service and have them encode and manage it. It is not CDN per se, it is streaming service.
I am a user of that, and few others! πΆπΎπ«‘
I could work with that. Set a max file size on the relay so photos work fine, maybe short clips, but full length videos have to be embedded from somewhere. Either a service I offer at some extra cost, serving from an S3 through a CDN, or they can upload and paste in a URL to post to NostrFans themselves at no extra cost on my end.
Images are adopted to a client by CDN too! Have you seen picture and img HTML tags? Not new, and thatβs how we have seamless experience on all clients!
Video needs re-encoding for even short clips, or say goodbye to mobile users (majority)! πΆπΎπ«‘
Yeah but Cloudflare and CloudFront just cache images automatically, they can just be set to cache everything coming out of a server so I don't think special config is needed.
Any CDN offering a video streaming service will auto encode for the target device if needed. If that ends up being costly I could simply have my web app encode and compress videos on upload using ffmpeg so they're mobile friendly already.
Honestly things are so flexible these days with services offering pay for what you use type plans it's never been easier.
If I was trying to do the same thing just 10 years ago I'd have to rent a lot more compute power upfront!
Depends on CDN, new generation does much more. Hash will be broken. JSON images will not play well.
Re-encoding on the client is not feasible, since resource consumption and number of formats/sizes needed is high. No mobile will last on battery.
Re-encoding is usually not done on-the-fly, only for real-time streaming at reduced quality.
And I do know what offerings are out there for most of that, just due to the nature of my profession! πΆπΎπ«‘π«
I wasn't suggesting encoding on the client. Rather when the content creator uploads the video to my site to embed in a Nostr note, my site would run a little ffmpeg script on the server to encode on upload, compressing and making sure it'll play nice with mobile.
Since this only happens when a video is uploaded and the result is lower CPU and bandwidth usage for playback it seems like the sensible approach, otherwise I'm probably paying extra to a CDN to automate that task for me per client.
I am not sure if you have experience encoding many videos on a server, but I assure you that it is a very costly operation. Youβll need a whole farm of GPU fitted servers to handle the load.
If you expect small number of uploads, then external service like Qencode, mux, etc. might be within reason from cost perspective, otherwise it can be prohibitive.
Scripting ffmpeg can be done, but diversity of source media can be a huge challenge, if you expect good results!
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I've only done this kinda thing on a small scale before but I do have experience encoding videos including on servers.
I'm not gonna be hosting 4K HDR here. I'm thinking 720p max. And the upload will be limited by file size so I wouldn't need to worry about the expensive task of transcoding 4K down to 720p for example.
In my experience working with videos in the 720p range is no problem for a modern CPU VPS.
As the service grows we may see demand for higher resolution but by that point the money would be rolling in.
But realistically most people will view this content on their phones. I don't anticipate huge demand for high res video. 720p is the sweet spot where it can be compressed sufficiently to minimize storage and bandwidth usage and not make any difference in viewing experience on a phone.
Fair. But youβll also need to consider using HLS and adaptive quality, if phones is your target. Also, relay and encoder should never be on the same system (security and performance). And synchronizing all of that between relays will be a challenge, once you want to go beyond 2-3.
Solved problem with CDN and object storage! πΆπΎπ«‘
I'm definitely planning on using object storage. I mentioned S3 earlier. Ideally wouldn't wanna use AWS, but obviously a lot of other hosts have adopted the standard nowadays.
Like I said from the start I'm only planning to store images or maybe small short clips on the actual relay. Any videos would be on a separate server.
Yes I'd have another VPS dedicated to encoding videos, then it would fling them to object storage once they're ready and they get served from there so I only pay proportionally to how popular the content is.
And at this point I'm really just building something experimental for the fun of it. If I get to the point where my biggest problem is keeping up with the sheer volume of high demand for my service I'd be pretty happy to say the least! At that stage I'll have enough subscriptions coming in I can scale up, pay staff if needed.
Not even thinking that far ahead yet though this is just a hobby project to try building something new on new technology. If it happens to actually take off that's a bonus.
Understood! It was a pleasure discussing this with you, thank you! πΆπΎπ«π«‘
I like it. My ceiling fans are ready.
I want to know more! This could be big for the porn industry. If you get it right, itβs big money (eventually).
We can work together, when I have things up and running you can beta test, if it all works I'll help you configure things for your use cases too.
Definitely big money potential here, and doing good for the industry by cutting out the middleman.
Onlyfans takes a 30% cut iirc. I definitely don't need to charge anywhere near that.
If you're taking any kind of a cut then aren't you a middle man?
To provide the distribution yes, but the zaps would go direct to their wallets, the payments can be split automatically.
So what I mean is I'm not acting as a payment processor. It's all going directly through the lightning network. I'm not a custodian of their funds. I'm therefore not charging to handle payments - this is why OF has to charge so much, because they get hit with high tx fees by the banks and credit card companies for being a high risk business.
Bitcoin fixes this!
But it doesn't make servers free, so yes I still need to pay for storage, bandwidth, and compute power to run infrastructure.
Either that or just a low storage cap on a free relay with the option to buy more storage. I believe the LNBits relay extension already supports storage paywalls.
Yea, I fail to see the controversy. Let the market speak, everyone is acting like millions of twitter users are going to get on nostr tomorrow and hate it for forever after. Let's treat this more like an open alpha, rapid development, shake things out, see what people actually want.
Exactly. The market will decide. Nostr ecosystem must work by market principles as it's a decentralised network without a consensus protocol. Different devs will use it for different things because that's how it was intentionally designed. The market will do the rest.
Just wait until they get the call from NCMEC saying they have CSAM on their relayβ¦
Text-based CSAM isnβt really a thing. But binary files just invite it.
NCMEC had 32 million reports last year. Relay operators need to keep their heads down on this one unless they love the Justice Department up their ass!
https://www.missingkids.org/gethelpnow/cybertipline/cybertiplinedata
Exactly. I'm sure relay operators do not want this type of headache at all.
NCMEC is a fantastic organization BTW π
Yeah I'm gonna ban this type from my relay too
And the kids are eating popcorn. πΏ
Not just me. Lots of people are NACKing NIP95. Of course vitor chooses to ignore all feedback as always.
I don't see why he won't make it backwards compatible. This isn't Ethstr.
We need a nip!
This is going to make me quit nostr this is a fucking joke. There is no other app on android that works as well or the ability to opt into what I want to use. Just an asshole taking advantage.
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It's crap like this as to why Twitter isn't going anywhere anytime soon. You have what we can equate to a dictator on Android with the only app for nostr that even remotely works well implementing crap no one wants and alienating entire clients of nostr, making running relays more expensive and giving his clients users 0 choice in what they want to use with nip 94 and 95. Why in the world would I recommend this to anyone? It's a laughable joke.
I'm sure Twitter made bad decisions over the last 17 years. Cut Nostr some slack, my dude. π«
And yet it's still super easy to get onto and it just works which is needed for adoption.
It's already hard to get any easy user adoption from normal people. "you should join nostr it's really cool. It's not too hard you just have to learn what relays and all this stuff is. Oh you have android? People aren't going to be able to see your images. Sorry about that."
As long as clients are doing this nostr is just the next mastadon without email.
Yikes. Mastodon is horrible hot garbage. It has more issues than Nostr. Nostr has one client doing odd things they only one other to my knowledge has adopted. This will all be sorted out soon. Have faith. Pura vida π€π»ππ«
If I don't speak my mind who will. This doesn't help adoption at all and it's the only client on Android that actually works and has modern features. As far as I'm concerned it's a huge problem, android is on an overwhelming majority of the world's smartphones that's not good.
We have several scenarios in play here, brother:
1. Amethyst is open source. Someone forks it an releases a version without NIP-94 and NIP-95. They have a cool sounding name. It gains popularity as the client on Android that allows images to show on other clients and doesn't bog down relays. It overtakes OG Amethyst because we're super fucking early here.
2. The devs at Plebstr, Current, Nostros, Plasma, etc. step it up a notch. The Android community Zaps the hell out of them to give them incentives and to hire outside devs to make their clients better. Some of these clients now become the top clients. Some fade into the background.
3. nostr:npub1xtscya34g58tk0z605fvr788k263gsu6cy9x0mhnm87echrgufzsevkk5s decides to port over his iOS app to the best and most popular operating system in the world. We rejoice in the centralization of mobile clients.
4. nostr:npub1gcxzte5zlkncx26j68ez60fzkvtkm9e0vrwdcvsjakxf9mu9qewqlfnj5z hears the outcry of many people, sees them not using his client as much, sees his Zaps and funding trending downward, he realizes that building backwards compatibility and/or user choice into his client is best. Vitor makes changes. Everyone is happy.
5. Every major client realizes that Vitor is correct here and implements NIP-94/95 the way that he did. We have mass consensus and we are all happy.
6. Or so we thought. Relay operators are NOT happy. They do not want images on their relays. Charging for relay access becomes the norm. All of the free relays do not offer image support. Clients notify people as part of the onboarding process that relays only allow a certain amount of images before you have to start paying. Users on Nostr appreciate Value for Value and pay for uploading images.
7. We realize we love Elon Musk, Dogecoin, centralization, closed source, and we go back to Twitter.
Or I port Amethyst to iOS and Web and then people can finally have access to a good client. :)
Wouldnβt it be better if helping instead of competing like ladies in a kennel mothering conflict?
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Or you could give your app users a choice to not use a nip implementation that is heavily disagreed upon.
This NIP will be the cornerstone to some much of the new features coming up. You can't do a lot with urls.
What features could you possibly be implementing that involve memes and pictures posted on nostr that people want an opt out for?
A whole ecosystem for creators
Don't think Nostr is just a Twitter copy cat. Some people forget that.
Then let people opt in with images, you can clearly allow people to opt out like you did nip95
People shouldn't be locked into using that content ecosystem you want to create, especially if they just want to post a meme.
I support the direction you're going in here, in fact it'll directly help something I'm building, but I still don't see why you can't make that functionality optional.
Add a settings menu and let users choose what functionality they want to enable.
Opting out of nip 94 for images should in no way break future functionality. You can clearly code this because you made nip95 posting optional.
8. Nostr Dev Celebrity Boxing Event. Winner take all.
I'm advocating for a karaoke contest in Miami next month. I don't know if nostr:npub1gcxzte5zlkncx26j68ez60fzkvtkm9e0vrwdcvsjakxf9mu9qewqlfnj5z is attending though. π
The protocol is great don't get me wrong and some of those scenarios could potentially be good. If someone doesn't start caring about the average social media user's experience nostr will be nothing more Then an echo chamber.
I gotta say, I'm not against the direction Vitor is going in, but I have no idea why there's no settings in Amethyst. User control should be the norm in Nostr.
I didn't agree with the OnlyZaps feature but I still respected how it was rolled out in the TestFlight version first and then only as an opt in.
That's how you introduce experimental new features, give users a choice.
In the end that's literally all we are asking for. He made nip95 optional there is no reason he can't do the same and make nip94 optional
Yup agreed. The lack of user control in Amethyst is a letdown and it will eventually lead to forks especially when you can't even turn off features that aren't backwards compatible with other clients. Or the community will just contribute more to development of Plebstr instead.
I find it ironic the main iOS client is way more customisable than the Android one. It's usually the other way around!
I hear this a lot around here. I run a Fediverse instance. Im curious what the perceived downsides of the Fediverse are around here.
Im still quite new to #nostr
#plebchain
It's an open protocol. There will never be any equivalent to a 'Nostr Dictator'.
"On android" hopefully other clients step it up and someone cares about the experience of the average social media user.
Plebstr is the best looking mobile app out there and Current has the best onboarding experience out there. Both Android apps. They still have ways to go in functionality. I have faith in them that they'll fill their part soon enough.
Iris can also be installed as a progressive web app on Android
I mean that's just an inevitability.
Patience, we're early. Being early is fun. Enjoy.
Amethyst is a great app, but it's far from "the only app for nostr that even remotely works well". You don't even need to install a native android client on android, Snort and Iris both work super well as installable Progressive Web Apps.
It's crap like this as to why Twitter isn't going anywhere anytime soon. You have what we can equate to a dictator on Android (listens to 0 feedback and does whatever the hell he wants) with the only app for nostr that even remotely works well implementing crap no one wants and alienating entire clients of nostr from seeing pictures, making running relays more expensive and giving his clients users 0 choice in what they want to use with nip 94 and 95. Why in the world would I recommend this to anyone? It's a laughable joke and so is decentralized social media because of idiotic things like this. #nostr #amethyst
Should we call it domestic violence? π
It strikes me that media embeds are generally problematic, either they are centralized (nostr.build) and relays are happy, or they are decentralized via relays but relays are paying storage fees.
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I feel like I've seen this before
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