Nostr Web Client

#askNostr What are the financial incentives for the different nostr stakeholders, like relay operators and client devs?

Over the decades, a lot of incredible devs have created some amazing FOSS software. But working out the goodness of your heart is not sustainable. A good project is good for humanity. A great project is both good for humanity AND it's financially sustainable, because such a project will grow and improve and attract smart people.

With bitcoin, all the different stakeholders have a financial incentive, and they all feed off of each other.

With nostr, what are the incentives for the different stakeholders, such as relay operators and client devs?

Some relays charge a tiny fee, but you get the same nostr with free relays. Some clients charge a tiny fee for premium features. You need a ton of users for that to become sustainable. And, because it's nostr, users are not locked in, they can leave any time.

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Discussion

Tekkadan, ゲロゲロ! 🐸 11mo ago

I think there will be more incentive in the future. For now there are only so many users, the network seems to be able to sustain its current operations. Over time clients will continue to evolve and accept that many relays exist around the world, and users might want to keep visiting them. Operations will continue to improve across the board. With this in mind, the interface for renting a relay from another party is far behind. Parallel this issue, clients are still trying to adopt outbox model. Working outward from "functional outbox support" is a bit of a climb, but I think Jumble.social is doing this right. In the settings you can create relay "collections" which double as custom feeds. This means relays can expand to support a more diverse landscape and userbase. Once Nostr has a good footing in these regards, I think a lot of the headaches will quickly dissipate. Free relays will likely always exist, but maybe they aren't particularly valuable to established users. That's how I see it anyways.

makeasnek 11mo ago

There's a number of them

1. Private relays are incentivized to provide good service and spam protection/moderation to their users since users pay them.

2. In other areas where we have many people/companies/markets depending on a piece of software, that software development tends to be decently funded. Bitcoin development is well funded. Apache development is well funded, etc. There will be many many apps built on and relying on nostr.

3. Many apps will or do suggest or require that a portion of zaps which you make through the apps goes to the app developers. This is very reasonable and can make a decent income for devs pretty quickly. I'm happy to contribute to development in this way, most users are too. If this is the standard model, devs have incentive to make the best nostr apps which can retain and attract large user bases.

4. Apps can include ads if they want. I'd rather zap than see ads, but I don't have a problem with ads. Premium features, like you say, is another option.

Keep in mind that at least for note storage, you can fit millions of notes on an android phone, hosting notes and relaying them is not that resource intensive. For other storage, there are many good existing P2P solutions we've had for decades that just need to be integrated to nostr. Every nostr client should route traffic to help the network in a true decentralized, censorship-proof, privacy preserving, P2P fashion.