Free Nostr infrastructure is unsustainable.
By the end of this year, a good chunk of it will be gone, if no one does anything about it.
Discussion
Agreed. I think we’ll see Primal’s caching relays switch to only being included in their premium subscription. Eventually, we’ll likely see the same with the Damus relay. The only things we might see stay free are if some nonprofit company creates a service.
Or data collection, and ads
Prices people out of even using nostr.
Other than ad space and file hosting, there has to be another way to earn.
Nobody's figured it out yet.
But it will be revolutionary.
Maybe some sort of a split zaps model. One portion to PoW to lower surface of spam. The other gets evenly distributed to your connected relays. nostr:npub1rtlqca8r6auyaw5n5h3l5422dm4sry5dzfee4696fqe8s6qgudks7djtfs sort of mentioned something like this. But again. Not the most user friendly and can definitely price out people who can’t or won’t spend their sats.
Why not a Zap fee? A % of sats transferred would support the network.
What do you mean unsustainable? It is sustainable as long as the administrator is willing to pay for the cost of the servers out if their pockets. Lots of people run websites, forums for years all paid by their own pockets.
The free relays have been running servers for free out of their own pocket, they just purged the free relay when the hard drive becomes free.
I would never pay for a service such as a relay out of my own pocket. It just attracts spammers, scammers and freeloaders.
The free relays operators have said they want to keep the relays free or it will push away new users because new users are not willing to pay for anything and it will slow down the growth of nostr. This is debatable what what we can do is education users once they are comfortable using nostr to move over to the paid relays.
Alot of this issue would be solved if free relays just added a small fee of 21 sats or lower to simply use the relay.
In the long run once Nostr is much more popular free relays will disappear and I believe a consensus can be reached by writing in the software that only relays that adopt a small registration fee can be part of the network.
A free internet is no longer the future going forward. It will still exist but the free internet will be just spam.
#V4V is the way ⚡ 💜
Are there cost details anywhere? For the curious
#asknostr
Is it possible that small groups made up of folks who all run their own relays can provide access to those relays to others in the group?
Would this increase stability for each of them?
and what would be the downsides?
helps with decentralization but each query will go to lets say tens of relays. which causes too much traffic. if you are on mobile it will hurt.
I don't wanna be a dick but I think the problem is, that we grew up with free internet stuff and we look other options when we see subscriptions. Subscription or three are not problematic, but more of them adds up and not everyone has American paychecks.