certainly,
someone somehow has to operate relays. The cost of operating relays must be settled somehow (i.e., paid relays)
If the relay operator were to use a non-censorship-resistant money + payment rail, the funding of that relay is *subject* to the approval of whoever can censor that money or those transactions.
Say a relay operator were to take USDC as payment: the US government could instantly shutdown that relay by knocking on the issuer of USDC and blocking those funds.
Totally understand this. How do the relays stay censorship resistant? What can I like a relay to to understand how Nostr is architected?
And who is paying these relays? I am assuming the relays I subscribed to are all free??
users/customers.
There are paid, and there are free relays; I pay for a bunch of relays I use.
I haven’t even encountered a paid relay. Can you send an example and explain the benefit? And what is the relay owner’s responsibility / what are they doing or providing or both, to the network?
here is a list
this is still extremely early so the "contract/expectations" of a paid relay are highly subjective/trust-based
I expect this will change, but aligning economic incentives is a cornerstone.
Adding user reviews to the site shortly, will help users in what is a somewhat asymmetric market at the moment with information on which relays to go with.
When it's free to write, people spam. Therefore, many users ignore global feed from free-to-write (F2W) relays. But it's a safe bet that people paying to write are not spamming, so reading the global feed from P2W relays is much safer.
If you want your content to be discoverable by people who aren't already in your network (followers, maybe followers of followers, etc.) then posting on a P2W relay gives a very high probability that other people will see it.
If I understand this correctly, if I pay for a relay from the like #[2] posted then I will filter out all the spam and be discoverable by others that have done the same? The global feed now is totally useless
yeah, on paid relays there's no noise since spammers usually don't pay and if they do, relay operators have a financial incentivize to kick them out
if you use Damus, which I saw you were using on one of your notes, if you have paid relays it will simply not show the cesspool of free relays on the global feed.
😉
I have a mix of paid and free relays on Damus. Global is still all spam.
interesting; I thought it was just showing up paid relays if you had them
are on you testflight or app store version?
Does Damus allow selecting what relays to use for global? Amethyst has that and so I don't see any spam in global. Also fwiw Iris only shows posts from people thay your followees follow (or something of that nature) and that also helps a lot...
Keep in mind there is no one “global feed” because nostr is decentralized. The global feed is actually *per-relay*. So yes if you use the global feed on P2W (pay-to-write) relays, it will be much cleaner. Note that P2W relays are still F2R (free-to-read), at least for now. So if your client has an option to select whether or not to read the global feed from each relay you are connected to, you can disable that for F2W relays and enable it for P2W relays, even if you don't pay for them (F2R).
The commonly referred “paid relay”, are they Pay-to-write or Pay-to-read right now?
I'd argue it doesn't depend on bitcoin. But bitcoin does certainly serve Nostr well.
how else can infrastructure providers and builders run things without being subject to defunding?
Can someone post a network diagram of how Nostr works / is architected?
The free market can figure that out. It seems like Bitcoin is the logical choice, but if Bitcoin were to be shutdown or otherwise unable to serve Nostr for whatever reason then some other solution would be found for sure.
