like subscription relays ?
Discussion
Subscription relays are certainly the best option right now and I haven’t been looking into it by laziness but it just adds friction to the user experience. Of course a good crypto-economic model is complex to implement and there is no guarantee that it will work better but it has the potential to provide a more consistent experience for all users. Also are relays asking for a one time fee really sustainable? I doubt it. We’ll probably end up paying a recurring fee but also we are loosing the key value proposition of #Nostr which IMO is decentralized redundancy. I’m not sure that users are willing to pay for several subscription relays. A crypto-economic model tied to an ad platform would seem to have more potential to me. Not that is is easy to implement successfully though.
If you look at the early days of nostr, paid relays were a potential sustainabilty source. Its one reason zaps are integrated. The Ad model has bad and anti-social incentives that we all could have avoided by paying for services. Imagine the lack of spam we could have had if each email cost a cent or something. Nostr's biggest threat is the same threat every other open protocol faces, capture.
Xmpp was embraced and capture by google.
All this could have been avoided if its users had paid their ideologically aligned core devs to make and focus on the protocol, instead of ad backed whales coming in. This is now super easy with zaps, the way nostr:npub10qk5zpmhv7rspp87shajf7d24yrf4lyr7w0m25wv9w78grs4k0sq0gq8pcand others are supported with Damus.
People like nostr:npub1sg6plzptd64u62a878hep2kev88swjh3tw00gjsfl8f237lmu63q0uf63m and the way he supports these projects is also good. He empowers devs and open networks in a hands off way, for the sake of society.
Tldr; we don't need ads to remain sustainable, but you are always free to start up an ad or subscription funded relay that curates the feed.