That's the attitude that everyone has on the internet. They build free software, website and other things and wait for everyone to come use their service then hope in a decade or two that they can monetize their product but in the end they get brunt out and never monetize anything. It's a terrible mindset working all those hours for nothing in return. It's very socialist.

I would say the growth of nostr if it was all paid would probably be not as fast as keeping the service free but there is lots of people out there willing to spend money. We can see confirm this on X as there is more and more people paying for a subscription.

I think their is many developers out there who have been in the fiat system so long that they have fooled themselves to work for free.

Unless it's their hobby then that's different.

This is a for-profit, centralized mindset that completely misunderstands what nostr is, and how it works. There are thousands of free relays run by individuals. People aren't going to suddenly stop running relays. As nostr use grows, so too will the number of free relays. I'd say free relays are the glue that holds nostr together. Sure, lots of people go on to subscribe to paid relays, or run their own paid relay, but free and open relays are absolutely necessary to handle new users, and supplement paid relays.

There's no pressure on this system that would make it dissappear, so this idea that nostr needs to centralize and become a paid service is ridiculous. People aren't going to pay for relays before they've had a chance to actually use nostr. And if we only had paid relays, the active user count would plummet. I wish people would think before posting declarations about what is needed.