Nostr Web Client

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GigaBTC 🌽⚡️🔑 2y ago

V4V thank you for building.

Anthony 2y ago

Zapped ⚡️ ⚡️ ⚡️

🙏

Wdnysl 2y ago

Thank you very much for sharing your thoughts. I completely agree with your viewpoint. I believe that paying for valuable services is crucial, as it allows us to truly own the content and information we consume, and support the creators who provide us with freedom and value. I will do my best to support them and make freedom a reality, not just a daydream #[0]

Chris 2y ago

Please support those who are building. Freedom ain’t free. ⚡️🤙🏼 TY to all the builders

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Bitcoinbekka 2y ago

Thank you Jonathan 💜⚡⚡🥪

Bitcoinbekka 2y ago

Don't be a LARPer. ⚡v4v ⚡

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Siggy47 2y ago

Agree 100%. Are there any statistics yet regarding number of users paying for relays?

I'll write up a report about this. I have those stats in the NostrGram database.

Siggy47 2y ago

That would be great. There was also a poll on Stacker News the other day asking whether users would be interested in subscribing to relays. This makes sense to me, because, let's face it, a dollar or two worth of sats as a one time fee is practically nothing.

Definitely. Having a one-time payment for a relay was just an experiment. To pay the bills they will have to have subscriptions.

stacker 2y ago

I’ve been thinking about this, the beautiful thing is nostr and lightning are perfectly setup to be pay per post. Even a small amount will keep spam to a minimum. And if you opt in to give a percentage of your zaps to the relay as well, it could pay the relay operator both per post and if you’re posts are popular, they may have more traffic but could get sats for zaps.

MaxMoney21M⚡ 2y ago

In fairness V4V is a new and I might say revolutionary model that's only possible because of Bitcoin & LN. It will take time for people to come to terms with it. It will also take time before we know for sure that it can work at larger scales and with a wider crowd (general public).

StackSats.IO 2y ago

It’s not new, #[4] has been doing the No Agenda podcast on this model for 15 years with fiat. Doing it on lightning makes it far easier.

Excellent thinking. A thought for you and the other client devs out there: provide a way to very easily zap relay owners, as well as client devs. I paid for all the relays I'm using right now, but I've got no qualms about sending them a few sats a day for good service. Not when I'm sending a couple sats out to posts I find helpful.

I like that idea. I have a list of all the paid relays and I've been pondering how to make it more accessible and present it better.

Anthony 2y ago 💬 1

There’s a list of Paid Relay Service Providers here:

https://relay.exchange

Vivi Nella Verita 2y ago

How about relays add moderation tools like every other decentralized platform?

Relatively Irrelevant 2y ago

Would you mind recommending three paid nodes/relays that do a good job of fighting spam and have bitcoiners?

mutuum8 2y ago

Free but focused.

wss://sound-money-relay.denizenid.com

This is a test relay.

IntuitiveGuy☯️ 2y ago 💬 1

Don't ask what Nostr can do for you, ask yourself what you can do for Nostr and all Nostriches.. pura vida! 🍀🫂☯️

#[0]

I will have to stick my neck out and disagree.

Paid relays aren't the solution. We need to keep working on this.

We need proof of work relays. We need an option to pay with sats to post (like on your phone, to avoid battery drain).

'Paid' relays don't fix spam, it just creates a little garden with high fences, for you and a few friends.

'Paid' relays should be optional. They should provide optional features like skipping the sats to post or work, or priority on bandwidth, NIPS05, backups, etc.

If we paywall this shit, it'll never defeat the mainstream systems of control, leaving millions behind. We must do better than pretty gardens with high fences. We want everyone to be free.

It's kinda obvious, but, paying to post on a relay, is paying the relay, making the relay, a paid relay.

The important bit is that it's optional. We need to accept proof of work as verification that you're not spamming. We want to build an accessible system, not fences.

I somewhat agree. Truly public relays, in the fashion that exists now, cannot survive. They'll get buried under spam, porn, and csam and be destroyed by it all.

Public relays that only provide write access for those that prove work however could be viable for those who just want to be on nostr, and will accept shitty service. You could pull that off by connecting your pubkey to a UTXO via on-chain address signature, or a recognition signature by a trusted party. It would stop the spam, but it wouldn't fund the relays, and they have costs. A charity relay that funds itself as a goodwill gesture is one thing, but demanding that of a relay is as immoral as demanding people zap you.

The only way paid relays become a walled garden is if there aren't enough of them. Public relays provide garbage service. The moment I went fully to paid, performance and reliability went way up. Most people will pay for good service that they value. If there are only a couple dozen paid relays, then all the good service is centralized. If there are thousands with good rates, then most people can connect to 20+ without a dip in quality, and the chances that people end up with nearly identical relay lists approaches zero.

Paying to post is another form of paid relay. I'm in favor of that model, too. Whichever one works best for people is fine by me, but the people using the relays have to be the ones paying for the relays or we're right back at the current social media model that's the root of so many problems and injustices.

There's just too much downside to the gardens with fences of 'paid' relays, is all I'm saying. Pay to post is the same if there's no option to post for free, like once every hour (reactions not included, maybe).

Proof of Work solves this and lets you verify its not spam without any of that.

Let's not be greedy for a monetization system. We need it to be engineered for freedom first. I don't have any doubt, people will voluntarily run software they believe in and that provides the world with a public good, without needing to be paid.

Solving spam without building fences is what we should focus on, not pushing people to pay for access to the gardens.

And who pays the bills for the people running the servers and writing the code? If you find value in something, be willing to pay for it. It doesn't have to be expensive, but everyone needs to do their part. There's no such thing as a free lunch.

I personally am not content to sit back and let other people pay for the things I use so I can get it "free", because I know it's not really free. Putting somebody else in control in that way results in what we already have: a warped social landscape where narratives are driven by the people that bought and paid for it. *We* need to be the ones that have bought and paid for it because that lets *us* set the narrative -- our own narrative.

That's my opinion. I'm open to other ideas and how we can make things accessible and better for all, but ultimately the people using the service need to be the one paying for it or we're back to a top-down model that wrecks the common person.

₿i͎t͎c͎o͎i͎n͎ ✶ 2y ago

Sounds like a free rider problem.

It has to be a cheap enough solution that the majority of the population can join but it has to cost enough that it is a barrier so smammer can't afford to spam..

All while, you have to make it simple enough for the masses.

That's where the relay problem comes into play. It's too confusing for the masses. I don't understand what half of these relay buttons do on Amethyst. I've seen the question asked multiple times but never seen it answered.

I've signed up for a paid relay but not sure of the full benifits of that are.

I agree. We have a lot of work to do to make everything simple and easy for the average user so it's not confusing. If people want the benefits they need to put a little effort into learning how things work (just like they had to do with their cell phones and the Internet), but the devs should do our absolute best to make that learning curve as small as possible.

Roaming 2y ago

What if clients start to be small relays themselfs? Is this technically possible? This way everybody using it contributes. Something like what ipfs does with files.

That's certainly possible for a peer to peer network as opposed to the current federated relay network. I'm in favor of that for clients that replace apps like WhatsApp. But devices like phones don't have the CPU or bandwidth to handle what relays are doing for the general social network. P2p also has poor performance in comparison, so pulling down large feeds like people do now would be a bad user experience. But again, I'm all in favor of a Nostr-driven WhatsApp replacement!

Proof of Work was originally meant to solve this problem, not the Byzantine Generals problem of transaction finality across decentralized participants.

It was a spam prevention proposal. Require someone prove they're a normal user with limited activity by doing a quite large amount of work that wouldn't bother a normal person making 1 post per minute or so. The problem is that this seems to be a phone first ecosystem and work is hard on a phone's battery.

100% agree - but voluntarism is a part of the value4value ideology, I believe.

Pay after you get the value, not in anticipation of it. If we require payment up front, before a good UX is witnessed, that's not value4value. That's just subscribing to a service that may provide value, you don't know until you try it.

Trust that people want to support all of this, they've just never had a means to do so. Subscriptions don't win, as seen in the current web. Subscriptions provide you with access to a limited garden of suspect value.

Let's just admit spam is one problem and support/funding the actual costs are another.

I agree that volunteering is a good thing for things you believe in, and I agree that letting people try-before-they-buy also works well in many situations. Clients could certainly let people give it a try before asking for payment. Relays, however, probably not -- spammers will just sign up and spam during the free period, then we're back to whack-a-mole problems.

I also agree that spam and funding are two different problems, but there's a vin diagram there with a lot of intersection between the two. I don't believe one will be solved without the other.

captain ☦️ 2y ago

How do you think proof of work solves this in a way that a paywall does not?

TheGrinder 2y ago

Very well spoken! stay humble. ⚡

Krypticity 2y ago

I think this is brilliant. I completely agree, however, it is so very difficult to put a value on the Bitcoin I have. It is so rare and the value is so great at this point because so few people have any. It's actually kind of painful to spend any. I'm quite sure I am not the only one that feels this way. Would love to hear your thoughts on that

I completely feel that! I think about it the way I think about any bills I have to pay. Why do I pay for Internet access? Because I get a lot of value from it. Why do I pay for a mobile phone? Same reason. I have to sacrifice some fiat that I would normally put into Bitcoin for those things, but the value proposition makes it worth it. Same with Nostr. If you value it, you should be willing to pay for it. If you don't, somebody else will and then they'll be in control. That's the social media landscape we have now, and it's been very destructive.

Social Media is becoming flawed terminology. Nostr shout avoid that tag. Try Shared Media.

When something is shared it includes all aspects. “ they had a shared love ❤️ of Nostr . So togetherness they nurtured it in growth . The one who couldn’t keep up we helped and the ones who hindered it were taught a better way.”

Krypticity 2y ago

Zapping you because you make good points. Maybe Nostr will incorporate things like marketplace and craigslist inside.

It's easier than it seems. Just get started. Get a lightning address on your profile so you can receive as easily as send, budget around 5000 sats in a lightning wallet (self if you can, but 5000 in a custodial is manageable risk), and start engaging. When you go to like a post, also zap 3 sats. Like just as you would otherwise, but add in the zap. Do it publicly, you want the engagement effect. Do it for a few days, or until your budget is reached.

If your experience is at all like that of those of us doing this already, you will discover a few things. First, a single sat will have clear, real value to you now. Not as an abstract concept of potential value, but as a real value you can provide to others as a social factor. Second, you will likely have received zaps of your own, like encourages like. Maybe you'll have a little less, maybe a little more. Depends on how much others enjoy your interactions. And third, you will really understand how shit buying things with dollars is, mechanically. If you have the same net percent of your earnings saved as bitcoin each month as you do now, but all of the spending that you do is done with bitcoin, you are still far better off.

I for one am certain that the way we create hyperbitcoinization is not by preaching the importance of the incorruptible store of value, or how perfectly suited it is as money. We get there by using it as money first, by making the use of it as money so unbelievably easy that every other method of paying people feels like wading through muck by comparison, and by generating enormous value between people without ever touching fiat. When people have to sell goods to bitcoiners for bitcoin because no one else can afford to buy them, and all the quality goods and services can't be purchased but with bitcoin, we've won.

This is truth. Unfortunately. If we don’t address this now it will just grow to become a bigger problem later. We have to pay. Finding away to incorporate sharing will be the solution. Because only through sharing can it increase.

Zapped. Keep fighting 💪

0d1f0a34... 2y ago

It is up to the clients to solve the problem, not the relays.

Cyberhub 2y ago 💬 2

Value 4 Value

Slavery

If we only take, then we are acting out the belief that others should exist to support us. There's a word for this. I'm eager to know what this world can look like if we can work together to continue to abolish slavery in all its forms. #[0]

Frédéric 2y ago

for newbies, could you make a list of peoples / projects who work hard for us?

Ferret 2y ago

I’ll second that

_ 2y ago

I’d like to see a pay per post relay where the revenue is split with the client.

bkb2443 2y ago

This is absolutely correct. Pay your engineers. Pay for the things you use, or they will certainly use you.

#[0]

This is the thoughts and feelings they had writing the Constitution and Declaration of Independence

berean jones 2y ago

Investing in the community you want to live in, be that physical or digital.

Bitcoiners talk forever about citadels, but nostr is a training ground for that kind of aspirational living.

💜⚡

Duncan Cary Palmer 2y ago 💬 1

So well said:

#[0]

There's many ways NOSTR clients can monetize their interface/app and improve UX simultaneously, and I'm not seeing anybody doing it. The opportunity is there for the taking for yourself or others.

Let me help you with the design of it.

I'm open to your ideas if you care to share them here.

Okay, let's start with the flow for relays:

All active relays should be listed in the client interface with subscribe & designate options presented clearly (e.g. global). When click on any relay, a simple explainer text should appear giving basic info about the relay and it's cost (if any).

The relay list should be sortable by activity, ascending order and other relevant methods so users can easily filter and pick and choose their preffered relays from the entire list of relays. The default sorting should show the top 3 relays by activity and places 4th and 5th available for "promoted" relays: relays paying the client for occupying that position. Highest daily bidder wins the promoted spot and gains extra visibility. Below 4th & 5th are the remaining relays sorted by the current selected sort option.

Hidden off to the side is a little icon that, when clicked, opens an advanced relay menu where users can add new relays by their wss:// and other advanced options that are cumbersome.

By implementing this UI you will:

- Make it orders of magnitude easier for new members to understand, access and subscribe to relays, whilst retaining advanced options for more experienced users.

- Give new relays an opportunity to get exposure whilst driving revenue for the interface/client/app. There are many ways to further expand on this for niche relays.

______________________

I'd be happy to visually design it for you for free. This, as well as many other flows that will greatly improve UX and/or provide further monetisation options (that aren't malicious and don't wreck incentives).

So take on advertisers. That's an idea, though it's my last resort. I would much prefer users to fund the app.

Is "take on advertisers" actually all you understood from my comment? I sincerely hope not.

Your basic premise is to take on advertisers, which is something I wish to avoid at this time. I get that wasn't all you had in mind, but my goal is to have users pay for the app, not third parties -- if at all possible.

Users pay for the app. okay where? How? Why? Where to find relays? Which relays to pay for?

Good luck if you think users will jump through all those hoops on their own to accomplish that. Build it as an intuitive functionality into the client, that's THE premise. Not advertising.

In short order there will be thousands of relays, maybe tens of thousands. I think tools to find and compare Relays is a good idea.

I’m not sure the nostr apps should do it or take sponsorships though. But a good space to start thinking.

I think sorting Relays by language first and then by capabilities to filter spam would be my top criteria.

Why in the world would NOSTR client interfaces NOT try to offer the best relay sorting experience possible???

That is a strong incentive for users to choose 1 client interface over another.

I use multiple search engines and multiple web browsers. I don’t necessarily want them tightly coupled.

I will pick the best app(s) for the speed, discovery, and zap features. For me, relay filtering is something I learn about independently of the app. YMMV.

Based on what you just said you are without a doubt NOT an accurate representation of the average social media user.

Agree and thank you!

My point exactly.

I look forward to seeing your UI ideas, I’ll critique and zap with an open mind! 🙏

Pierre 2y ago

Why multiple search engines? If you use a private one isn’t it sufficient?

Mostly I use Kagi (paid, private). Sometimes DDG. Sometimes Google Reverse image search. I like Apple Maps for whatever reason. Keeping my eye on Bing for its ChatGPT integration

StackSats.IO 2y ago

You’ve been perhaps the most vocal discussing business models for client devs, it’s something that does need to be put out there as we’ve become so accustomed to “free” stuff without considering the work that is actually going in to products we consume.

Yesterday I gave 1.2M Sats and posted about it because I want to help normalise this behaviour. For some people that might be a lot of money but realistically it’s not in the grand scheme of funding these projects to be full time enterprises that can financially support Developers.

That however is an important place to start, the cultural element of V4V. Because I don’t expect that I alone will provide enough value to make a project viable, but I can be part of a community that does. Encouraging others to contribute AFTER you have done it yourself is a positive behaviour we ought push.

We should also look to having some frequency to this, something memetic so it can be adopted broadly. “Funding Fridays” for example where Users make their V4V contributions and post about it. This ensures value doesn’t fall off a cliff, devs don’t have to push it daily and plebs don’t feel like their whole feed is V4V requests all the time.

We should however also look to augment this as much as possible. Bounties for example should be encouraged and widely discussed, if someone wants a feature then put up a bounty!

Another huge opportunity I see is wallet splits like podcasting 2.0. Users could select devs they want to support and allocate a percentage of zaps to them. Or when lightning polls come, devs could receive a share of the Sats from that poll. These more automated microtransactions help ensure value is flowing constantly and it’s less reliant on conscious actions by consumers.