"no clear incentive" argument doesn't cut it, never did.
There is 100m self-hosted sites on the web, and owners _pay_ to host every one of them. Their incentive is their business/hobby/etc. On Nostr, creators/businesses have the same incentive to run their own relays and to pay for good relays to have their notes delivered to followers. There would be at least 10m relays if Nostr got widely adopted, not counting all those phone relays serving as local caches.
Creators pay for web hosting. Creators will pay for nostr relays/media-hosting/etc.
I know free social platforms made this a bit non-obvious, but please look around the web. Hundred million people and businesses pay to have their own online space. Nothing new here.
Replies (5)
I hope you are right. People try to conflate nostr and bitcoin growth and I cannot see it at all. I always look for the incentives, every aspect of Bitcoin provides positive incentives to human greed. I do not see those incentives for running a relay. The profit/risk ratio does not seem (to me) enough of a driving force for an ever growing number of relays. I hope I am wrong.
Disagree.
Yeah damus is a proof of this. I suspect there will be many other apps and businesses that run relays to support their users and use cases.
I think he's only looking at social media point of view. For that I agree people are used to social media to be free.
But if he wants for example to add nwc for aqua the best way is to have a aqua relay
Instead of using whatsapp for a company group he can make a relay for his company and use something like 0xchat
Most people are seeing nostr just as a social media but theres a lot of the other stuff to explore
There are incentives for those who run them . Ecash mint operators would run relays. Businesse and creators on nostr would. Specialized Clients looking to provide unique experiences for their users would also run relays
