I can imagine having a relay that I pay to be a member. As a member it agrees to broadcast all my notes + notes of non-member users who are tagged in mu threads so that sufficient context is always stored for all my activity
Client/relay combos feel very dangerous to me. The moment a client will preferentially or worse solely work with its own relay counterpart things can go bad. That being said, as long as your identity is your key pair you can switch clients at will
Yeah, this is hypothetically what differentiates Nostr from mail servers. Switching mail providers has the high cost that you lose your identity and have to start over, and so mail providers have a lot of sway over users. As it stands relays have no sway over users or their identity. You can jump ship to another relay whenever you see fit, so that’s promising
Creating monetary incentives for relays to provide a service will be the easy part. Making it such that it won’t slowly centralise over time is the real challenge. And it might be hard to predict what policies would prevent that from happening
How will Nostr be able to avoid the fate of email?
It started, like Nostr, as an open protocol. Anyone could set up SMTP servers, but most didn’t, opting instead for managed email services (you can imagine something similar happening with Nostr where people would opt for managed clients that offer better UX).
Over time the managed email services made up the majority of traffic, and in their fight to prevent spam, they took ever more heavy-handed approaches to filtering. Emails originating from untrusted non-managed SMTP services were deleted on receipt, never to be seen again. Try starting a new mail service today. It’s not possible. Email has become a walled garden, an oligopoly.
How do we build the right incentives into the operation of relays and clients such that spam, bots and all kinds of fowl play are dealt with in a way that doesn’t compromise on the open access and censorship-resistance of the protocol?
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Agreed, but nostr still has everything to prove and much to be figured out. Once the real traffic arrives, bots and all, it will be interesting to see how _and if_ nostr will be able to handle that….without enduring the same fate as email