Can ordinary users blacklist sites/clients at the protocol level...? To stop their messages appearing on porn or hacker or hate or corporate sites that try to drag everything in..? But having to do that for every site would get boring very quickly, so what about some kind of generic protocol level "no porn/crime/spam/bad thing" opt-in..?

How do you rotate keys in Nostr? What happens if someone forgets or loses or deletes their private key? What about some kind of 2FA or 3 or 4 FA?

The problem is getting the number over that basic line (3 btc, or about $70,000 in the example at the start). 30,000 people x 10,000 sats would be better than 1 person x 300,000,000 over the long term because but it takes longer to try to reach 30,000 people than to reach one. Selling 30,000 people on an idea vs. selling one on it.

The numbers are out there, they are not unplausible. The Thirty Thousand or The One could solve the problem by lunchtime today if they decided it was the thing they wanted to do. And with ⚡lightning, the motivation-decision-friction cycle is just a minute and a few clicks.

If 30,000 people have decided they like your reporting, it's unlikely all 30,000 of them will unsusbscribe at the same time, so you have solved the basic funding problem for the activity itself in a way that is probably sustainable and in which no one person has power over what you report on or how (no one can just decide to pull the plug becuase they don't like it).

Maybe there are some kinds of reporting that would need more money relatively per person, war zones, say, or big trip X, or if you want to start doing team stuff or documentaries or whatever it is, but basically that is a good real number per reporter doing some journalism thing.

From a reader's perspective, what do we have, how do we get there?

1) Tips (I like that individual comment, article, photo, video)

2) subscriptions (I like this journalist's work generally, or believe in press and democracy, and want to do ongoing support)

3) donations (same motivations as subscriptions but just want to do one-time, not ongoing).

Then it's just maths. Number of readers x each reader's contribution x time. In the middle, there are articles or photos or video reports that energise people more or less. There is also a problem with the emotional reactions different stories cause in readers for differen reasons. Maybe the story, because it is sad or horrible in some existential way, does not lend itself to the kind of emotions that cause readers to want to subscribe. Maybe it even causes rejection. Maybe a story riles readers because it is contrary to their polarised tribal political opinions. Etc, etc.

Right, somebody else mentioned bolt 12 earlier too. The combination of tips + larger donations + subscriptions doesn't really matter as long as we get somewhere near that finish line every year, which is about what it would cost to do it properly.

Also could do a better sales job generally with journalism. I can tell you that for me at least, the topics that generated the most interest and economic value from readers over the past ten years were hard reporting and anaylsis, mostly really deep. So a huge complex train crash in northern Spain in 2013, the messy elections 2014-2016, the whole Catalan separatist trial (every day of it) at the Supreme Court, the first year of the pandemic (including going right inside closed Covid wards with camera and mic before vaccines). The problem with extras is that we're all drowning in "more" anyway and the point of journalism is to bring things into the open, the public sphere. The WP slogan is not wrong.

Thank you. Yeah, maybe, it's like the buy a coffee or a beer option, not a huge expense you'd notice. To add up, 30,000 of those a year is 2,500 a month. With 100,000 readers, that's 2.5% deciding to buy a coffee each month. A bit flimsy, maybe, but not impossible...

Okkk, that could be promising for subscriptions.