14 TB of notes served from the damus relay in March.
Discussion
Where can we donate to the relay?
It reminds me when Reddit started using gold “badges” as a way to pay for “servers”. It was a community phenomena.
All my servers are costing $600 a month.
Only revenue i get is through zaps and that is dwindling it seems :(
Appreciate your service 🙏🏻
Zaps incoming ser ⚡️⚡️⚡️ Keep building you will figure it out.
Please send out contribution requests an a regular basis so we can better support
Paid relays are the future, feel free to charge me for the value you provide.
Damus Purple fixes this
$6.99 ⚡️
We really need to implement a mechanism to share zaps with client developers
And relays.
⚡️🍎⚡️
🫂
🧘🏼♀️
I'm not going to assume this hasn't already been considered but how about prioritising notes that are archived by the amount of zaps they receive and/or finding a way for some of those to go to a relay automatically?
There's no reason all of my notes need to be kept forever, for example.
When optional subscription?
Everyone!!!! Set a monthly reminder to send #[4]some funds to keep the #[5] relay going.
#[0]
We need a some kind of sustainable business model.
My sense is that we would start seeing archival relays before too long. That is, relays with slower storage and retrieval that free up the critical path relays from having to keep events at the ready for as long.
I’ve been working on something very tangentially related to this as a side project for a little bit now… wonder if all relay operators are feeling the squeeze as well around storage/service costs 🤔
I very rarely see events older than a month in my timeline having been reacted to, commented on, etc.
Most relays could store a rolling 1-3 months of data and be very useful. Keep hot the metadata kinds 0/3/10002 and then a month of data.
The concern however is a similar problem to broken http links on legacy internet.
I think the archive relay is certainly the direction headed. We don’t need to keep 2 year old data indexed as well as recent. Or we can purge older revisions or replaced events (if stored).
An alternative to the archive relay is paid relays that persist a pubkey/members data for longer periods or forever. I think this will be common too.
All relays all data.. that will die the next couple Nostr 10X jumps.
That’s crazy
Millions must zap, billions even
What is the most costly part? Maybe you can optimize and reduce costs for that. Or charge for relay - 1 month for free and then sats per month, that could be good?
Start setting a fund button for @Damus, and maybe a monthly zapraizer with the amount you think is needed to cover the costs and nkt only, I think you pay the bills at the end of the month so.. 😅
Don't be afraid to monetize, try with free donations and monthly zapraizer, if it doesn't work I am sure user would pay for a monthly/annually subscription to Damus or an upgraded version.. like, why not upgrading testflight tonmore people and let them pay to be have new builds and implementation first than anyone else. Just an idea.
#[4]
I’d bet a lot of plebs would setup zap splits to share a portion of their zaps with devs if that was an option.
Paid relay is totally reasonable.
Maybe a few months free to help onboarding, but then sats.
I think it’s important to have free relays to on-board normies. But if you can set up a paid relay, a whole bunch of early adopters would happily migrate to it.
Finance your investment and stop whining. Are you an entrepreneur or are you employed by us? I've gone for years without any income on some of my projects. Learn what future income means. You're going to be filthy rich.
don’t make too many assumptions about any individual’s motivations/commitment or financial circumstances. no two people are ever the same
How many assumptions did I make?
I have no idea what this guy is talking about. I was stating facts and observations, not whining. I am planning on making damus revenue generating, but I am focused on making the app good first. I don’t want to sell something that is crap.
You're doing a great job, that's beside the point. What I'm triggered by is that you say you depend on zaps, and you say those are dwindling. While we're still in this fiat economy where money is cheap and you can get a loan to bridge this period. Get some financial advice and you'll be well off for building one of the best apps ever created.
#[4] is building something that lit a fire of inspiration in all of us and (IMHO) is amongst the primary reasons that nostr is gaining the traction that it is. If he needs zaps to support him in this beautiful moment in time, then let's support him with bitcoin and not suggest he take a fiat loan or go into debt. He's a driver of a community that we've all come to love and have gained enormous value from. He'll get to revenue and a long-term business model, but until then, let's show him how a community can support young, important projects.
I like your take, but hopefully there is room for someone who doesn't shower jb55 in likes and rose petals for everything he says. My response is genuine and from experience. I appreciate the man for the beauty that he is creating. I'll give the response he doesn't want to hear but has a place.
This is a good take. Tough love works wonders. Just don’t start tough love with an insult. Whining was not what he was doing and if anything, the guy just builds without sharing any of the actual tough shit that goes along with it. I know whining, this ain’t it. And by starting off with that, your overall point will be discounted, discarded and that’s unfortunate.
Good point, the wording could've been better.
I don’t ask for this. I’m simply trying to build the best nostr client while simultaneously trying to make it sustainable. I can’t control how people respond to my posts. I am not fishing for compliments, and my posts are not made to generate sympathy to get zaps. I am m posting what things cost to get an idea what it’s like to run the most popular nostr relay, and to point out that zaps can not sustain it at this number of users and zaps. This why I have been focusing on bringing damus to the masses so that we can get to the scale where it might be possible.
well said
Thank you for your honest response. Sorry for using the word whining. I hope you do understand that I am on your team, even though I'm not being nice to you. I know what it's like to start a business and live with the uncertainty of revenue and I hope you make the right financial decisions to finish your work. I will keep supporting devs, and you.
I never said I depend on zaps
But zaps help I’m sure.
I was making an observation that zaps is are not a reliable revenue source, at least at this user level. everyone kinda knows this by now.
can i help offest the burden with an adjacent relay on embassy not looking for zaps?
BAN HIM!
Haha 😆 JK.
This is NOSTR, decentralized and open to opinions and conversation. You’re doing a great job Will and your investment will pay you multiples. And perhaps Lau is trying to give constructive criticism.
All Damus users are receiving value for your efforts here Will
I believe we all have an obligation to support those efforts, within our means ⚡️
Yes, but he should not rely on that.
He stated facts/ observations re: his entrepreneurial efforts… It’s not an easy ( or free) journey
If you don’t want to support development, that’s on you and it’s your prerogative. No judgement.
But If that were my stance, I’d just remain quiet vs calling him a “complainer”. Because that’s just dick and incorrect
ios is a such a small market
Ain’t that right, David, since what had been the cause for two people if not the root causes for all this mess, when destroying for those doing their job, but hey, guess the ego and power getting hurt when incompetence becomes illuminated is not mentioned, and if only the two were not so different from themselves. Go swing an axe.
👐🏻
He’s not whining, he’s stating a fact.
That's not what that emoji says. He has a great following and this statement will generate more sympathy in the form of zaps which he shouldn't rely on to begin with.
Didn’t know you were the emoji police 🧐
Build the next Damus and then offer advice on what he should or shouldn't do #[5]
That's a pretty lousy disqualification. I'll say what I have to say.
Zap
What’s your lightning address?
Have an idea
Zapped!
Not sure where you’re hosting these servers (AWS, Google, Azure etc). If you’re using one of those, make sure you contact your account manager and apply for funding in the form of credits. It takes 5 min. Most will give up to $100k in credits for those backed by VC, and smaller amount for those that aren’t.
I’m sure this has been covered but I can’t zap from Muun right? I get an error.
#[3] needs some zaps⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️
A recurring fee option?
Zapped ⚡️
Thank you for your work.
That’s a lot. Thank you for your service
#[3] 🤯 I owe you so many drinks now 🙇♂️
if there's time in japan, i'm all in 🫂🍸
Cant get my zaps through lol...keep getting error guess your ln address under duress 😎
Here you go ⚡️💜🧡🙏Thanks for your work on Damus
paid relays
i wonder why twitter doesnt show an ad sometimes before a video starts. damus could do it too?
Zapped! But I would also pay a subscription.
p2p no servers
Bro I think it’s time you work on some paid features 😏
Wen ads?
⚡️
Atleast you get zaps #[4]😏
Excellent work, bro, as the amount of data increases, we need to think about sustainable models for commercial profitability.
How do you see the future of relay if Nostr goes mainstream ? You will not be able to store everything. Are professional relay substainable ?
Ok here is an idea (I’m not a developer), it would be cool if there is some lightning based community funding standard / mechanism where each participant automatically pays an equal amount of share but the more people participate the less you pay. Fully automatic , probably with some max amounts to prevent you get rugged. (Same as streaming sats)
This should work for any cloud related federated service that just need funding to pay the cost, for commercial services we can let the market decide on solutions.
It is dwindling because there is no PR campaign to promote NOSTR and the number of new users is dwindling. The last good PR was the Forbes article in May. NOSTR is the best kept secret in Social Networking! Anybody interested to pitch in for some good PR? I'll contribute 1,888,888 sats if Damus, Coracle, Amethyst and a few others contribute like amounts. 30,000,000 sats should at least get a small PR company to do some promotions! #grownostr
how many is junk/spam?
That's amazing! Do you have a chart around how that's grown since December time frame?
Nice 👍🏻🤙🏻🔥
Wow... 👍👍
How much did that cost you? 😳
Can you purge the spam? No idea how that works.
Rookie question: Do you store all the notes or are you purging them once they cross some threshold of an age? I guess it's not sustainable to keep them all... 🤔
Will have to purge them soon
why not take a share of all zaps; maybe integrate lightning prisms and add your addy as default to every post?
no idea how it works or if it's possible tho, i must confess 😂
We have had good luck with our Adopt-A-Relay and are working to try to form a Relay Alliance as a non-profit to promote donations and dispersement of funds. Would also promote streaming between relays for better decentralization.
Probably a stupid question but can something like keet/holepunch help by making each person essentially host their own content?
nostr works because it is not p2p
relays amirite
It’s not going to work when 14TB turns into 100’s TB.
You can’t keep footing the bill.
We might need to normalize having Nostr clients support export and import backup functionality — saving to local disk, iCloud, Google Drive, or wherever. Not everyone will run their own personal relay so this might be a good alternative.
yeah cloud backup is a cool idea
Won't that take us back to centralized authority or is that a risk we are willing to take in the name of storage space?
Not really. As long as you have the option to backup to your own non-custodial storage and/or to one or many storage providers, that mitigates the risk.
Those of us in the porn industry use A LOT more bandwidth than that. (I'm a small player in the industry and use double what you're talking about and have a more reasonable hosting bill).
It may sound odd - but do what the majority of the porn industry does and use Mojohost…
https://cs.mojohost.com/aff.php?aff=273
They've got great service and good prices. AND they understand free speech issues. If your content is legal and you resolve legally problematic content quickly, they're happy.
DM me if you want an introduction to a sales person.
300MB on inosta 😅
#[0]
瞬间就不想搞relay了……
Possible to have a recurring zap payment?
Paid relay is the only way. Free relay can exist with limitations or inconvenience.
Over time, I think 2 things will (or should) happen if we want nostr to be scalable to user bases as large as Twitters and beyond.
1. Most relays will become either paid or ad-supported. For the latter, I know this is a big topic, but there are ways to do ad-supported without it turning into the garbage you see on social networks today. There will of course still be a smaller number of free volunteer relays, but those will probably be the minority.
2. As I love to rant about, a combination of NIP-65/Gossip on the content discovery side, and automatic selecting of relays to post to based on uptime + server load of known relays, in order to evenly distribute the load.
#[0]
I think over time we will also see paid relays needing to move to either a recurring subscription model or a pay per event type model as I don’t see the current one off payments as being viable long term as relays need to scale up.
I’m not entirely sure how ad supported relays will really work, it would be easy to have clients that just don’t display ads that the relays return.
Ad supported relay is a big shit. The best thing at nostr is that is ad free
That’s how it is currently because of the smaller scale. Paid subscription relays will be able to scale without ads, but if we want nostr to be used at a scale like Twitter, the majority of casual users have absolutely zero interest in paying a subscription for social media, and so ads will be needed to sustain most unpaid relays.
This seems wrong on so many levels but here’s two questions to better understand it:
- Why wouldn’t a client just drop the ads?
- Why don’t we just convince people to pay like they do for newspapers/magazines?
- Clients could definitely work around the ads if it’s easy to distinguish regular notes from ads
- They’ve gotten used to social networks being free and ad supported, they see newspapers and magazines as media, so they’re more willing to pay for what they perceive as professionally made content. Harder to convince someone to pay for a social network since the content is just random people posting, in their eyes.
These are my observations of how casual users behave btw, this isn’t my personal view of social networks.
- What do you mean by “if” every note is signed 🤔 it will be completely obvious
- OK but, obviously, that’s just an assumption in your end right?
Yeah these are all assumptions/predictions on my end based on my observations of casual users on social networks.
I’d love to be wrong about this!
No offense, but I’m starting to think you don’t have an answer to my first question. Relays can’t show ads because they can’t fake signatures.
It would probably have to be some sort of new event kind that allows relays to sprinkle ads within regular notes. Would still be easy for clients to just not allow those event kinds if they choose.
What are your thoughts on how nostr could sustain a user base the size of twitters?
This is an open question and it’s good to speculate about it. But ads, at least the way you’re thinking about them, is just a bad answer. Detracts from the conversation.
shooting down ideas as “bad answer” while adding no answers of your own isn’t a conversation, it’s classic online snark. leave that shit on reddit lol
bro, sorry to be blunt but your “idea” is stupid. clients aren’t going to implement a new note kind just so relays can spam their users with ads. if anything clients need to be better at removing spam.
I think there’s lots of good ideas and if you took a second to read through my timeline that would be obvious, but here’s a couple:
- “uncle jim” relays like wss://anon.computer where some tech savvy person whitelists their friends and family
- dropbox model: free but you get bugged over dm when your “storage space” is running out and asked to upgrade
- the pay to post relays we already have
and the last 20+ years of social network data has shown that while enthusiast/heavy users of social networks are willing to pay for the service, the vast majority of casual users have zero interest in doing so, and are willing to put up with ads as the compromise.
So if we want nostr to expand beyond enthusiast users into a global social network the size of twitter, hoping casual users will miraculously be open to paying isn’t gonna cut it.
Btw, if you’re going to so quickly resort to lack of social awareness with “nope bad answer” and “stupid idea”, then feel free to ignore my posts and keep the autistic outbursts out the replies.
lol
Agree
the difference in nostr is the ability to not see ads is just switch to another client, so the ad ridden client needs to have a really powerful set of features that no one else has to be able to get away with it, in other words, social media ads are dead, what you'll actually see more is "influencers" shilling shit, because they have the audience. so IMO, the model will switch to full on endorsement ads, and those will popup on your feed because you follow those accounts.
yeah, I can see things like that, getting a percentage of zaps sent to posts, referral links, when products are shared, etc
lmao, so clients would have to opt-in to ads by implementing some new events kind?
I don’t see why a client would ever do that.
I think of relays as similar to telco provider. Pay, and you have service. Don’t pay and you are cut off.
How can we build the ecosystem so that the user paid model is the default choice?
What needs to be in place?
The ad model will win if we are not putting our act together and choosing to do it differently this time.
People pay if it's convenient enough. Ask any Netflix or Spotify users vs. torrenting content.
One easy way to pay for relays is to be able to know how to do it. I would happily pay, but there's no ,,pay for relays'' button in my client. It could just distribute money to all relays that I'm following and take a part of it, and it would be a subscription.
Also I want half ads for that money!
I'm glad that my niche relay generates only a slight fraction of this traffic.
Can we add Sats fee for every post the user make according to his note size, his attached media ?
User have to send sats to make a post.
At one point this will be necessary I think.
Enlighten me If I am wrong.
I don't think nostr should be "pay to play" but if a client wanted to implement something like this, or all zaps have a split with developer(s), I can get behind those ideas.