Could nostr be captured by an oligopoly like email, why or why not ? \ stacker news ~nostr

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Could nostr be captured by an oligopoly like email, why or why not ?

758 sats \ 5 comments \ @llamabyte 6 Jul 2023 nostr

Looking into self hosting options, Umbrel in particular and noticed they do not offer a self hosted email app option. I then came accross this article i'm sure many are familiar with, and i had read through similar reasoning years ago. Since then Rob Braxman has set up his own service.

https://cfenollosa.com/blog/after-self-hosting-my-email-for-twenty-three-years-i-have-thrown-in-the-towel-the-oligopoly-has-won.html

So what do you think ? Could nostr get so big and integrated into society like email that custodial services find a market and the cycle repeats ?

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21 sats \ 0 replies \ @JesseJames 6 Jul 2023

No one stops you from running your own email server, it's the pain to deal with that's why people pay someone for the trouble. YES you can run it, no one said its easy. Google, outlook, etc does it because they are better than average joe in managing it, plus they have incentive when they sell your data... You do have a choice, the question is whether its worth the hustle or not. Nostr is too young to judge, it remains to be seen. It does have huge potential but knowing people, someone will screw this one up for everyone..lol

10 sats \ 3 replies \ @03365d6a53 6 Jul 2023

nostr has built in spam prevention - 402

ie, payment required, by relays

this eliminates the spam risk which is the main cause of the challenges in self hosted email

want to message someone on nostr? you just need to sign up to post to (and potentially pay for) one of their relays

this simplicity is worlds apart from the complex measures email providers have dreamed up

10 sats \ 2 replies \ @llamabyte OP 6 Jul 2023

V4V right ? It's supposed to, but I've heard that a similar scheme was planned for email. Adoption only happened when people were offerd free services though. Good email providers go out of business all the time because people still don't want to pa for things.

Suppose the non-nerd core of society gets ahold of nostr and starts offering easy custodial options for free... like AOL or Hotmail/gmail did

Keep in mind nostr has not undergone a true bot attack yet , especially not on the scale other services deal with. So in an environment where the noise to message ratio because comparable, what prevents a few whale corps offering free nostr. Then they start to capitalize on it somehow , then they start changing the protocol ect ect.

1 sat \ 1 reply \ @ek 6 Jul 2023

people still don't want to pa for things.

i think with lightning, we can pay for things but still basically pay nothing.

think of 1 sat or 1 msat or 1 μsat. all possible on the lightning network.

i think people will pay for things but they won't notice it. this should fix spam since spam has to pay the same amount but it scales linear. or possibly even exponential like on SN (your first reply costs 1 sat. if you want to reply within a minute, it costs 10 sats etc.)

so it will overall be a greater experience. you also pay (a minuscule amount) for the option to get paid, not only for a world with less spam. i think most people will take this option instead of the existing "free" models. "free" as in "i use your data, invade your privacy and you have to look at ads"-free.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @ek 6 Jul 2023

thanks for 1 sat, i appreciate it and see what you did there xD