One common complaint we hear from Nostr haters is that there is no economic incentive to run relays or that the network will be centralized in a few central big relays. These claims often come from confusion or misunderstandings. I think this 40s video will clear all the matters and answer all the criticisms: If anyone doesn't understand or has a problem with this answer, please, I would like to hear it.

Replies (102)

Anchorite's avatar
Anchorite 1 year ago
I have lots of trouble using Primal nostr and I think it has something to do with the relays. It will randomly refuse to load for a period of time, in full or part, it will randomly forget mute lists, I am getting anon payment requests from 'relays...' It's just a frequently frustrating mess, and I don't think his response is nearly serious or in-depth enough.
The explanation seems packed into the โ€œoutbox modelโ€ phrase which Iโ€™m not familiar with.
In-app marketplace for media bloom servers, relays, shop profiles and etc I think would also help a lot for determining what services are desired, where and how.
Thinking about this post by @fiatjaf about the cost of #NOSTR relays. Relays are web sockets, a server and a client. Web sockets over #NOSTR should be cheap, because notes are broadcast, and when broadcasting notes, sockets are very efficient. Let's say @jack posts a note to a relay, that relay can BROADCAST that identical note to all it's clients who subscribe to Jack as opposed to sending differing data to all it's clients. To estimate the potential savings, let's consider a scenario where a web socket server sends 1 KB of data to 100 clients. Same data to all clients: Memory: 1 KB (a single copy of the data) CPU: 1-10% CPU usage (depending on the broadcasting implementation) Network: 1 KB (a single packet sent to all clients) Different data to each client: Memory: 100 KB (100 separate copies of the data) CPU: 10-100% CPU usage (depending on the packetization and sending implementation) Network: 100 KB (100 separate packets sent to each client) In this example, sending the same data to all clients can result in: 99% memory savings (1 KB vs. 100 KB) 90-99% CPU savings (1-10% vs. 10-100% CPU usage) 99% network savings (1 KB vs. 100 KB) Keep in mind that these estimates are rough, but it makes the point that #NOSTR nodes should be very efficient, and thus relatively cheap in a competitive environment. View quoted note โ†’
This video isnโ€™t convincing me at 100%. I worry about the storage capacity of the network. We know social medias generate a shit ton of data. I get the horizontal scaling but this is gonna take a lot of relays. Itโ€™s also gonna require clients to be capable of connecting and holding to a lot of relays simultaneously. Some options Iโ€™ve heard is too use Archive Nodes which I think is a great idea.
Dan's avatar
Dan 1 year ago
Many who build an application on NOSTR, will have an economic incentive to host relays. With lightning, many people may get into the business of hosting relays just like BTC miners take fees for transactions, and the computing power would be FAR less expensive. This area is very interesting to say the least.
I don't know if it a valid complaint but my main problem with this answer is that a computer dork looks like a sexy and buff movie star and seeing that makes me not want to leave my house ever again.
It doesnโ€™t need to be stored forever โ€ฆ you can just back up your notes and wipe relays periodically
The outbox model is where each of your followers can see your chosen relays. This means when they want to update their feed they know which relays to query for your information.
Well, well , well. Look familiar ? Bittorrent's bleep. It died , I think because the feds took over the bittorrent company and then killed off this idea. Probably too much if a threat ? There may be open source forks out there ? "With BitTorrent Chat, there aren't any "usernames" per se. You don't login in the classic sense. Instead, your identity is a cryptographic key pair. To everyone on the BitTorrent Chat network at large, you ARE your public key. This means that, if you want, you can use Chat without telling anyone who you are. Two users only need to exchange each other's public keys to be able to chat. "
So wait, a client will first search a small set of your preferred relays for your profile, then it will look for your follow list. In the follow list, it has info about user profiles it finds your follows' profiles from your preferred relays and then in each profile, there is an outbox. Now your client is querying for data across many relays for many people (optimising where it can) and aggregating that data before presenting it on screen. Is that the gist of it or are there any technical mistakes?
I think this is not a complaint though I sometimes wonder if something like zap split or V4V model x pay-as-you-go model will eventually come to certain relays. Say, everybody always has some sats in wallet to post and some amount of sats automatically get splitted to a relay that has LN address when a certain 'kind' threshold is exceeded against a relay. The key is relay runners can decide how to run relays of course and to not force people to pay sats to use relays, keeping it opt-in.
it does help, having one of the biggest clients with the biggest relay endorse outbox while still not having implemented it yet. its raising the bar for clients, i get it takes time, is harder to implement, and im very patient, but i will not shut up about it. Cause i was promised a nostr where "if you dont like it run your own relay". any clients still not doing outbox, are dangerous to the network and the idea of freedom on nostr.
So thats something to note and anticipate. Current social medias (despite being crooked) allow me to scroll back as far as I want to.
Agreed. But it can be perceived as a โ€œdowngradeโ€ from the current crooked social medias that allow me to scroll back as far as I need.
Camilo JdL's avatar
Camilo JdL 1 year ago
Makes sense to me. Also: if illegal torrents work and scale, how couldnยดt Nostr work and scale as well?
Actual speech disappears instantly and only exists afterwards through first or second hand written accounts. Nostr may not be able to permanently keep a record of all notes, but through nostr our speech is much more likely to last for decades or even centuries and millennia.
This, and also to have every client be a relay as well, for the current user that's using it + their X level of WoT with Y limit. Damus has or is working on something like this (Not sure if they're doing WoT for it) View quoted note โ†’
Kim's avatar
Kim 1 year ago
Wow you are handsome
Prince Aleph's avatar
Prince Aleph 1 year ago
"NOSTR haters" are basically peddlers of desperate BS, trying to keep us tethered to the centralized SV-based platforms that have done us so wrong. And whose followers, I might add, are extremely dubious people -- not "entrepreneurs" as was always claimed, but likely assets of the state, or even worse, foreign governments or international crime networks. Decentralized social media threatens the surveillance, grifting and brainwashing apparatus they have so carefully built. The only value these platforms have (to their end users that is) is their network. We should be using their services to poach people to places like Nostr.
That's awesome! Honestly, the more I think about it, the more I realize it's way too early to be concerned about scaling issues. The Outbox model works well, and there's room to scale the current implementation. If Nostr grows so much that we have scaling problems, that's a good problem to have ๐Ÿ“ˆ
I think a lot of the commentary comes from folk who have already discounted nostr, and need reasons to keep not looking at it.
I'm not a tech guy, but hearing this might look like you are saying that the Web is starting to be rebuilt on stonger foundation than 30 years ago. Like I listened to a podcast with Jack explaining that what once screwed up the legacy web was the discoverability issue leading to Google&Co So are you basically saying that nostr fixes this? Seems to good to be true, this why their are still lots of nostr sceptics/hate IMO
Fotoart's avatar
Fotoart 1 year ago
How many devices are left on at home for the convenience of the "just in case"? It's all about what we value. Running a relay for free is doubtfully more expensive than these expensive rarely used electrical commodities we have on standby.
A one click solution would be ideal. Make it easy to run a relay and more people will do it.
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Non Profit 1 year ago
Daddy @jb55 ๐Ÿ‘… you remind me of my Canadian doctor ex boyfriend ๐Ÿคทโ€โ™€๏ธ sorry for the joke, donโ€™t tell your wife or @jack
Agree. I have web servers and would like an easy install into existing infrastructure.
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Non Profit 1 year ago
You look exactly like the Canadian family medicine doctor ex boyfriend. Canadians are so nice when the ex wanted to marry me, he asked me out on one knee wearing the same shirt youโ€™re wearing and took me to a beautiful island ๐Ÿ๏ธ for proposal, but Iโ€™m a full time slut so Iโ€™ve never been married but the doctor ex bf and I are still friends and occasionally talk to each other
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Non Profit 1 year ago
If you messaged the Canadian doctor ex boyfriend on fb and asked him why he proposed to me, to this day, he tell you that Iโ€™m the best sex of his life ๐Ÿ˜‰ ๐Ÿ’ฏ heโ€™s married now, so my loss but he still tells me this
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Non Profit 1 year ago
I went to a Canadian med school so most of the men I dated were Canadian doctors
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Non Profit 1 year ago
Iโ€™m sorry @jb55 I hope youโ€™re not too mad about the jokes, I started a new antidepressant that makes me horny ๐Ÿ˜œ my bad ๐Ÿ˜ž about the jokes
Dakota 's avatar
Dakota 1 year ago
Maybe I missed the point @jb55 was saying, but I come at it from two angles. 1) $20/ month is more expensive than what it costs to use twitter, instagram, or facebook, so most people wonโ€™t do it. 2) check your financial privilege. itโ€™s a point a privilege that $20/ month is a laughably small amount for you to consider, but for some folks thatโ€™s a lot of money, so you just priced out poor people from running a relay. Open to hearing what I missed!
Not everyone has to run a relay. Unlike twitter, you dont need to spin up your mega corporation to participate. Opportunity to participate and freedom just increased by orders of magnitude!
You don't need to run a relay to participate, but if you want a relay just for you $20 is definitely too expensive, you can get away with $3.5 (that's the cheapest VPS I could find). $20 buys you a relay for at a handful of thousands.
This is misleading framing. $20, or as fiatjaf clarified $3.50 to run the relay for your community of 3,000 people. $20 nor $3.50 is not a cost to participate. Compare to twitter ID required (billions dont have this), and bank account required (billions dont have this).
There is value to running your own relay such as having it as an archive of your posts and other stuff, and also to serve as a caching proxy to reduce client load, and a private server for stuff you don't want to spread around, like drafts. Also with nip 29 it can be a more private way to run groups. Additionally a relay that is combined with hornet/blossom can serve as a replicated and encrypted data backup. I think the use cases will continue to grow.
Nostr is, among other things, decentralized identity with a signaling layer. Those are foundational to building any kind of discoverability, so, yes.
Yeah damus is lagging on that as well as nip 17 dm's. Nip 4 is still hanging around largely because of iOS (damus) users.
Each client publishes 1-3 relays they are writing to, and 1-3 relays they are reading from. Your feed comes from subscribing to the write relays of those you follow. People communicating to you send to your read relays.
I sort of agree. Hopefully there will be some incentive for archive relays or something
I run two relay servers which only Japanese can join, but they can be operated with free of charge. However, it would probably cost more than $20-$30 to make them available to the rest of the world wide.
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Octothorpe 1 year ago
Learning while securing our freedom. Don't care I'm running a fiat deficit doing that๐Ÿ˜
Prince Aleph's avatar
Prince Aleph 1 year ago
Should read "founders" above, NOT followers... Autocorrect did that. And it messes up the meaning of the post.
True, but I feel like I get more out of my streaming accounts than I do social media. If I had to pay more than $5/month, Iโ€™d likely just opt-out entirely.
I hope so yeah. Many people dismiss this too quickly as you can see in the comments
One common complaint we hear from Nostr haters is that there is no economic incentive to run relays or that the network will be centralized in a few central big relays. These claims often come from confusion or misunderstandings. I think this 40s video will clear all the matters and answer all the criticisms: If anyone doesn't understand or has a problem with this answer, please, I would like to hear it.
I don't have a clear answer because many ideas of how to handle this come to my mind, many of which can probably be used together depending on the user and the circumstance. I'll elaborate on this a bit more and reach back to you.
There are many good reasons to run a personal or trusted small community relay, one of which in the future could be indexing services for that small community (or just you).
Arenโ€™t people running relays to store their own data? Apparently the free relays are still growing. Seems to be mostly the app developers running the relays
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