Have big tech & VCs pay for relay 🤓
As I've proposed a number of times now, post links to BLOBs hosted on a free provider, instead of the BLOBs themselves.
Ideally, integrate uploading of BLOB to the most common services (google drive & iCloud) into clients.
Relays can then switch to charging per GB. Won't be a lot for those who post mostly text or links. But will punish those who hog the relays.
I fail to see how this isn't a viable idea.
It is a good option but I still think that people are not going to pay to post even if it is a small amount, if so, the user base will be ridiculous.
It is a better option for example to add ads in the relays.
Nostr model (privacy and decentralization) is 💯 opposed to ad value capture (data collection and targeting). Will lead to either minimal revenue, or softening of nostr principles. Ultimately, infighting over the right way.
Disagree.
Blockstream is effectively advertising here already because they know who they’re targeting without needing data collection. Nostr, when it segments to communities and locales, will have effective advertising options the same as classifieds, local advertising, and trade publications used to.
🤔 good point, partially plausible. In a way, the nostr community as a whole is a pretty homogeneous target group because of what it stands for. And as it grows, it will tend to split into more groups centered around the respective relays.
But it doesn't make advertising on nostr particularly profitable, because it's hard to measure and report on views while keeping privacy a priority.
This is already what relays do, they don't store blobs, only links to the upload and cdn services like nostr.build. relays don't need tons of disk space, it's just json text.
Oh, thanks. Wasn't aware of that 😳
So then why is the mere text download and storage such a big problem? Hard to imagine a relay that does text only is expensive to run.
It's not..
It depends, actually. If relay is big enough, the bandwidth and storage can be a problem. Well run relay is expensive to run, nothing is free, especially people’s time. 🐶🐾🫡
Yes, the time it takes to try to combat impossible spam is I think a far larger cost than the server cost. There is also, many times when someone just 'throws money at' the problem (in the form of paying for more servers) in order not to spend the time optimizing the service. In a startup when hours are scarce and money is not, this is a legit way to run. For nostr, I think it's an unsustainable way to go though.
Agree. And also think that the current duplicate all events to all relays thing is a huge problem down the line. 🐶🐾🫡
