Explanation for the misinterpretors: no, I am not earning anything from paid relays, they are being run by other people, and I doubt they are earning enough even to pay their huge server costs.
Discussion
I hear the same arguments about Lightning Nodes. Someone has to pay for the service. If you want to kill the ad model - pay for the services in some way.
pay for posting... can you imagine every post require a payment of 5 sats?
You can switch relays…or run one or someone will run a relay for family and friends. Free market will take care of it.
running a relay has a cost even at the family level. I think that future relays will turn into a federation of distributed relays that support one big relay so the cost of maintaining a big relay is not absorbed only by one person.
this thread is interesting, and as the saying goes "following." I'm going to roll a relay on my dedicated server, but yeah - I'll say these things are not cheap... at least mine isn't.
I do what I do out of love for the people in this world, but I'm really hoping and praying at some point it will start to be that I don't actually have to pay the server bill each month , 100% by myself.
Makes sense 💯
There will be philanthropic relays likely.
I think pay for service is good for the sound ecosystems, unless you are the product. by the way it will increase the quality through competition and cover cost 😊