For a full-time senior developer in HCOL areas in the US (New York, San Francisco, etc.), yes, or at least close to it if you’d expect them to work 40+ hours a week, just like they would at Big Tech or Major Banks.

Nostr already has plenty of active npubs. How many active users do we have right now, around 30k? If 10k of them paid $10 a month, that would be enough to fund three full-time developers; say, Fiafjaf and a couple of core US-based devs. Alternatively, you could fund six people in Germany, twelve in South America, or even more across most of Asia. Or a mix of all that. You could also have part-time developers... lots of possibilities. And as Nostr grows the funding would increase.

Whatever the setup, I think donations should flow directly from plebs to devs . Not from BTC companies, not from billionaires, not from private equity and VC Funds. Otherwise, we’re essentially saying that Nostr (both the the protocol and the ecosystem) isn’t worth $10 a month to its users. And if that’s the case, then honestly, there are already plenty of centralised, extractive social media solutions out there with a much better architecture than Nostr for the "ADS and User data extraction" use cases