It's not a hard problem to solve. I host my own stuff, and people are willing to pay for hosting via nostr build.
The people who don't want to host their own stuff or pay for it, well they are not important. Freeloaders don't belong on nostr.
Discussion
The difference with hosting using a VPS is that you pay with your time and using someone else’s infra still. So in the end nothing is free.
Some things also don’t exist like moderation because it’s only your media, and tradeoffs like no CDN.
I have a dedicated server and it's quite cheap compared to a VPS.
Yes you are right, nothing is free. I am paying for my dedicated server unless I host my own stuff from my home, but even then I pay for my ISP, but that is what makes nostr great is that there will be not a lot of freeloaders like X and Facebook. It's more organic.
don't support freeloaders!
Remind me what Nostr was for again. Between WoT, auth, PoW, paid relays, paid media hosts, and filters, I’m starting to forget… Something about decentralization and privacy, right? 🤔
Hosting media for untrusted users is a very hard problem to solve. It can be "easy" for very small numbers of users and viewers, but scale slightly beyond that and guaruntee %99 uptime and it's a nightmare.
It’s not even uptime but abuse. All sorts of things happen.
Yeah, you're right I guess I was throwing that into availability. I don't have a good solution except for aggressive rate limiting, but that doesn't fix ddos, or poorly configured clients that can hammer endpoints while loading.
Yeah, spam media too/CSAM.
About bandwidth, you need a front-box somewhere that takes the majority of the load with caching, and having that onprem is expensive due to it becoming DC uplink level pricing.
Yup. I've been thinking of a tiered arrangement to keep cost down as well. Smaller boxes on edge, larger boxes behind and big ass bulk and cool caches locally.
It's only hard for admins that allow freeloaders, if you stop allowing freeloaders then it becomes easy. It's the admins that are complicating things themselves