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90 sats \ 8 replies \ @sambuca 20 Apr \ on: RealRossU Thoughts on Nostr nostr
Fair point that there is nothing at the protocol level—what business models do exist are all over-the-top. Some people might point to one or another over-the-top model (nostr.wine, etc.) and say that business models do exist, but that's missing his point.
Something that also makes it hard to tackle is the fact that relays don't store or serve media. A note on a relay might be 500 bytes, but that note could point to a video that is 100 megabytes. And those paying the infra costs for each would have to be incentivised individually, given that relays and media servers are separate worlds.
Food for thought.
Paid relays are antithetical to decentralization
Or are you going to pay multiple relays to hold the same data for you when just paying one should already guarantee that your data won't be lost? Are you going to pay over and over again for each note, reaction, zap, whatever to keep nostr decentralized?
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General thoughts on payment and decentralization aside, I'm not sure why the focus on relays?
If I post a video that's 100MB and 1,000 people watch it in a month, that's easily $5 in CDN costs, depending on where in the world the viewers are and the network tier.
The relay cost to store and make available the 500 byte note pointing to the video would be next to nothing, maybe not even $0.01.
If the only text in the note is "OMG this is hilarious!" then the note is meaningless without the video, so the video cost can be seen as part of the cost for that note.
What I'm getting at is even if there were somehow free relays for everyone, the bulk of the "Who pays?" question still remains.
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I'm not sure why the focus on relays?
because how many actively and evenly used relays out there are is what matters for decentralization
not how many zombie relays or paid relays there are
The relay cost to store and make available the 500 byte note pointing to the video would be next to nothing, maybe not even $0.01.
So the media on nostr is not decentralized, I agree. It's like NFTs on Ethereum where they just store the URL instead of the actual content iirc
But this isn't our biggest problem. Nostr's biggest problem is literally just storing simple text in a decentralized way. Hence my focus on relays.
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Relays don't matter if they host notes that point to media that doesn't load. You could have millions of notes spread perfectly evenly over 10,000 relays but all pointing to just 3 media hosts. Take down those 3 media hosts and you've created such a mess that many users wouldn't bother coming back, every other post or thread would be missing the media context needed to make it make sense. Media serving is just as much a chokepoint as relays.
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I totally agree with you but I’m trying to say that the centralization of the media content doesn’t matter if there aren’t even 10,000 relays to begin with. I would think that most content on nostr is just text stored directly on relays, not videos or images stored on external centralized services.
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Ah right, somehow I didn't see your full reply until now. We're definitely on the same page then. My feed is pretty image heavy, every third post or so. For something like an Olas it's all images, so the question of media hosting and CDN costs there is pretty glaring.
But you're right, Nostr's biggest problem is indeed that it's not decentralized for even plain text. I don't know what the latest stats are, but before it was something like half of all nostr users never write even a single event to anywhere outside of the top 5 relays.