Greg White, [Aug 22, 2023 at 5:25:31 PM]:
🤔 interesting question.
I don’t know if anyone running a relay is running it at a profit, but I haven’t run one publicly so I don’t know how many adopters you need to make it so.
Most clients I’ve seen only support a “fee to join” model which means you need endless new users to make it work.
What you really want is like a monthly thing, or a “per post” charge but I’ve not seen anyone implement that yet. nostr:npub1gcxzte5zlkncx26j68ez60fzkvtkm9e0vrwdcvsjakxf9mu9qewqlfnj5z is working on more robust relays though I think.
It’s not a terrible hassle if you use relaying.io but that’s contributing to centralisation of relays (to that one provider). But better to have more relays, it’s still a step in a good direction.
It’s non trivial to run it yourself unless you’re very comfortable with AWS, Digital Ocean, or something similar.
What other questions do you have?
Overall relays need more dev investment or Nostr will struggle. I’ve seen the count of active relays decline by a lot over the last month on the ones I’m tracking on https://relay.guide.
