Hey Alex, May I take some time to explain what NOSTR is, before I go on to give you some practical advice. First, NOSTR is a protocol, nothing more. The clients you’re using have been written by either OpenSats founded companies like Primal, or in the case of Jumble, a guy as a weekend project. Clients like Primal attempt to give you an onboarding that emulates X/Twitter as closely as possible by hiding every part of the protocol from you. It’s a great start, but it isn’t the goal. Most clients are free because they are individual projects, some have paid tiers like Primal that give you access to stronger features like premium, paid relays:

Primal

Live Free

But NOSTR is not a social media platform or company, it’s just a set of standards called NIPS (Nostr Implementation Possibilities)

NIPs

Nostr Implementation Possibilities (NIPs) — searchable index

Browse, search, and read every Nostr Implementation Possibility (NIP) — always in sync with the official nostr-protocol/nips repository. Start ex...

The relays you’ve been using are run by individuals or companies for free to help you onboard and if you are a light user, then most volunteer relay operators are happy to continue to give light users free access in an attempt to grow nostr. NOSTR, as a protocol, has no underlying company, algorithm or financial structure. That’s great because nobody is trying to manipulate you with algorithms or sell your data or advertise to you, but it also means there are limited resources to support non paying users. There are bundled payment services that package a better experience like Primal (shown above), but if you start to delve into NOSTR, you’ll find you are able to run your own relay, host your own media and verify your own account. If you don’t wish to spend the time or money implementing these services for yourself, there are third party paid services. Apart from the Primal packaged solution above, a more granular approach is to run your own relay, media service and identify verification. Beyond Primal, you can pay for a relay service like

nostr.wine Relay

The most reliable paid relay on nostr.

or you can spin up your own relay using a third party service like @npub1fvma...szfu If you want full self sovereignty, then you can host your own instance of strfry here:

GitHub

GitHub - hoytech/strfry: a nostr relay

a nostr relay. Contribute to hoytech/strfry development by creating an account on GitHub.

Media is handled separately. Primal will do this within their packaged service, or you can pay for a service like @npub1nxy4...avr7 Verifying your identity is the genuinely clever part here. On X or even on NOSTR you can pay a third party for a little badge against your name, but the ingenuity of NOSTR is that you can genuinely validate yourself. If you look at my profile, you can see I do this. If you want to understand how, I wrote an article about how to unify your email address on your own domain into both your provable identity and your lightning payment address here:

NOSTR Identity and Lightning address yourname@yourdomain – Mike Hardcastle

If you have any questions, let me know, I'd be happy to help.