Nostr Web Client

How does running your own relay address relay costs? At the end of the day you’re still paying out of pocket AND have to pray the powers that be don’t come down on you should someone upload some illegal junk.

It seems we need a service in the middle to subscribe to that does filtering professionally (a marketplace of such services).

Then the problem of monetization is still there.

Maybe relays have sponsors and show some sponsored message if you’re using that relay? Perhaps they get premium placement at conferences? I dunno.

Maybe larger for profit businesses run one just because? 🤷‍♂️

Are the paid relays here breaking even or still in the red?

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Discussion

utxo the webmaster 🧑‍💻 2y ago

If relay implementations come with spam filtering then you don't need a middleman, you just update your open source filters.

The cost is extremely low if people share small relays. I can host a relay for 20 friends for $10/mo, split 20 ways this is super low, and will get lower.

Some relays like nostr.wine and nostr:npub16fcy8ynknssdv7s487nh4p2h4vr3aun64lpfea45d7h4sts9jheqevshgh will offer premium services

I imagine services that also make it easy to make your existing PC both a relay and a client and maybe just offer the DNS for free.

And other services will offer a relay as a perk for being a member.

There are a lot of ways this will work imo.

Shawn 2y ago

My nostream relay running on Railway spiked to $20 once, but otherwise has averaged $10/mo.

utxo the webmaster 🧑‍💻 2y ago

And you could easily host many people on that relay, it would probably be cheaper if you were running strfry too.

And that's another thing, relays are getting faster and more efficient alongside the hardware and the internet pipes.

We could be worrying about $10-$20 when in 10 years this cost could be $1

tx00 2y ago

Could you share some details? Specs, vps provider, whatever you think is worth sharing or you wish to know beforehand.

I would like to run a relay, first for testing, then we will see how it goes

Thanks!

jascha 2y ago

We don't plan to offer premium services. Now we stream from the relays listed on our site and filter spam from them as well. Always encourage people to run relays and stream to us. To insure data is decentralized is best to use a nonprofit model since once profit comes into it things get black boxed fast and silos created.

jimbocoin 🃏 2y ago

You don’t have to allow anyone to post to your relay. You can filter be pubkey and maintain an allow-list.

FilanysZ 2y ago

Maybe like boost in podcast. 2.0 you could choose to divide your zaps in an predetermined percentage that you are willing to share automatically to your relays?

HoloKat 2y ago

You can already do that on snort I think

SMS 2y ago

So does ities.

FilanysZ 2y ago

zap pool found it very cool

Ingwie Phoenix (aka. birb) 2y ago

I run mine for fun. If I can selfhost something, I will try to do so to learn more about the tech involved. Since it hardly consumes anything on my server aside from some disk space, I'm quite fine.

That said, some filtering would be awesome. strfry has a feature for that, and I hope to see a little more development on it in the future. Could be neat to have a community-powered filtering solution.

Still, people running relays mainly, with a much bigger userbase, need compensation for all this setup and maintenance.

DataNostrum 2y ago

Similar thought here:

@note1ggz0wa6dyssdcxq3reg5l2l2jt8vavtjpp7047avnyq2acugus2s5v3txv

DataNostrum 2y ago

Sorry, the @ trick doesn't work in Iris, trying in Damus instead:

nostr:note1ggz0wa6dyssdcxq3reg5l2l2jt8vavtjpp7047avnyq2acugus2s5v3txv