Free relays will kill this ecosystem. Teach people the true cost of the Nostr or the protocol will starve. The handout days are over. The zap rails are in place. No excuse for losing money in this space. If people don’t want to be the product then pay for the product.
Freedom ain’t free.
Yeah dude. Subscriptions aren’t the future. It feels like it is the best business model today but people will revolt against subscriptions. We are surrounded by too many. I don’t have an answer to what is a better model where people don’t have to pay. Imagine Nostr Layer 2 for people who don’t like to spend for persistence.
Nothing is free. The people pay or they become the product. Certainly Will doesn’t need to subsidize a Damus relay for the Damus Client. That’s a shit business model. Nominal pay to post is the future. Folks are zapping around generational wealth for funny shit posts but won’t pay for the rails. Lightning nodes charge for routing. This is an identical use case.
If paying for participation is the model then may be it is not innovation that all seem to believe it is. It could be a good model for other purposes. Imagine Damus charging $8 per month for using the client and Relays doing the same. Freedom USA relay, Freedom UK relay etc each with different definitions of freedom charging different fees. You will end up with walled gardens everywhere. Again, I don’t have an answer but I also feel subscriptions are not a solution. As the value of sats goes up so will the zapping for fun.
Thinking more about this Ephemeral notes are a really good idea but more of the cost goes to traffic. But definitely long term archive is a premium feature.
Also I agree that subscriptions are a bad (easy to implement) model. Pay to post is the way to go. Dynamic markets determine reach baseline is 0.1 sat / kb. Your army of followers can repost at 10sat/kb expand your reach and duration. Signal wins. Nostr incentives are too heavily slanted to the content creators and not the infrastructure.
This will work well post onboarding. Pay to post will have a heavy onboarding setup that will disincentivize people and impact growth. Slow death.
Voluntary pay to post for free tier relay. Mandatory or subscription for premium relays with premium features like note archiving?
Clients would be wise to implement these payment rails since most have their own relays for performance and new feature compatibility. Will can’t be going broke on client development. It’s the Damus.io relay costs.
Free is fine to get us started, and I'm grateful to the people operating free relays altruistically, but it will be untenable as Nostr grows and the load on relays increases.
