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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 (79)

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 β†’
This video isn’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. It’s also gonna require clients to be capable of connecting and holding to a lot of relays simultaneously. Some options I’ve heard is too use Archive Nodes which I think is a great idea.
↩ replying to npub15ssy...l6uv
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?
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.
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. "
Update on BitTorrent Chat | The BitTorrent Engineering Blog
Inside BitTorrent
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.
Ge nostr
fiatjaf's avatar fiatjaf
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.
View quoted note →
"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.
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
↩ replying to npub1nx9w...lwzg
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.
Who will run the relays? All of us.
fiatjaf's avatar fiatjaf
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.
View quoted note →
↩ replying to npub1zc34...jpe6
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 you’re wearing and took me to a beautiful island 🏝️ for proposal, but I’m a full time slut so I’ve never been married but the doctor ex bf and I are still friends and occasionally talk to each other
And the micropayments can help monetize
fiatjaf's avatar fiatjaf
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.
View quoted note →
πŸ‘‡πŸ‘‡Interesting/ImportantπŸ‘‡πŸ‘‡
fiatjaf's avatar fiatjaf
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.
View quoted note →
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.