You have a good point. But who is going to support builders? It’s not like they have unlimited resources to build and support their livelihoods. I know there are several organizations where builders (devs) can get rewards. The rest of the builders (content creators, etc) are not as lucky. 🐶🐾🫡
Discussion
Yeah I agree. That was where I was going with that last question. I’ve been thinking a lot about how to make building an open platform sustainable. It’s a hard problem.
Grants and VCs can work really well for discrete projects or “maybe massive” future businesses. But my belief is that decentralization, like we want from Nostr is an inherently size constraining force. I don’t believe VC is the right path for most (like 98%+) businesses in Nostr.
Which comes back to the question… how do we make this sustainable?
I’ve been banging my head against the wall, figuratively speaking, for some time. The main problem I see is that there are too few donors and too many takers. The market size is also not big, so investment is very risky.
There is also problem with possible reputation issues, since there are no moderators and anyone can post anything, which leaves advertisers in doubt.
Plus nobody wants to see ads, yet not many want to pay. I already saw a few freemium relay maxis, which makes no sense to me. I don’t understand why people feel entitled to free services, yet want privacy and no tracking.
All these companies that made a product out of the customers completely spoiled it for the rest.
Apologies for an overly pessimistic view. 🐶🐾🫡
No need for an apology. It's a conundrum for sure.
Part of Nostr's world domination will be a necessary return to users paying for products & services that they value. I'm optimistic that Nostr will bring us back to a world where small and medium businesses thrive and consumers have a huge amount of choice in who they do business with.
We still have to get there though, like you said.