Traditional social media is pretty intuitive for most people; you hand over an email address, set a password, maybe a 2FA option or two, and you’ll have access to their servers. You’ll now have the ability to create a profile, follow and be followed and, most importantly, create content on these networks.
Traditional social media treats users like babies in the car seat pretending to drive. While you might be having a ball of a time, pretending to turn left and right and “affect” the process, the truth is you’re only along for the ride. You are at the mercy of the algorithms, and whatever it feels will keep you on the site longer and get you to engage like a mindless NPC.
If you could control your feed, you wouldn’t have a legion of social media influencers begging you every time they create a piece of content to “turn on notifications” for their posts or videos. This is simply a market reaction to how follower reach has been marginalised and why so many online personalities have to milk salacious material and sensationalise content to continue to gain attention online.
Social media is not a meritocracy; the best ideas and high-quality content don’t filter to the top, only the content that gets more people to engage and provides more data points that can be used to feed targetted ad campaigns.
Decentralised social media puts you in control.
If you ask the average person, they probably don’t see anything wrong with the way social media is constructed because they’re there to be fed the current thing; they enjoy being the product. These users aren’t interested in curating their feeds and finding the truth. They’re only interested in finding whatever is social consensus and what is palatable thinking.
When you use traditional social media, content is spoon-fed to you based on how you engage with it and creates echo chambers. The service might be free, but you are not free to explore the content on the platform or free to curate your experience on these social media sites.
If you send someone towards a Nostr client, they’ll probably be overwhelmed by all the “work” they have to do to “manage” their social media experience. In the Nostr ecosystem, you first have to create and safeguard your private key, if you lose your key, it’s tickets for your account, and no customer service is coming to reset your password.
You will have to start over; then there’s the work you have to do to curate your feed by either finding accounts to follow or picking off signal you enjoy from the global feed. The problem with the global feed is that it is built on the relays you subscribe to. If you’re only following public relays, your feed might not be of the highest quality.
Depending on the public relay or relays you follow, your global feed and even the posts of popular accounts on nostr can quickly be filled with spam posts.
The public relay problem
There are over 100 public relays available today, and they offer a great service in free onboarding for the average user, but they do come with an issue. Since there is no cost to access, read and, more importantly, write to these relays, spammers and bot accounts will naturally gravitate to them.
Relay owners obviously have their work cut out for them, blacklisting spam account public keys and pruning their content. Many do a good job, but this is a reactive process, and we all know how persistent a spammer can be, especially if there is a possibility of reward.
If you’re using a public relay and you’re not willing to pay the cost of dealing with spam, you can migrate to your own relay or move towards a paid relay. This is not to say public relays are useless. If you are careful in the curation of accounts you follow and use a client that has a block list function, public relays are still viable.
The issue becomes as nostr scales; the sheer volume of spam flooding the network will see more of it filter through to your feed. If you want to add a barrier to entry in accessing your screen time and wish to have more control over your feed, then paid relays are your next option.
What are the benefits of paid relays?
The obvious benefit of paid relays is the education in spam. Since there is a cost involved in broadcasting to these relays and reading from them, the idea is that you won’t be subject to spammers and bots that tend to bombard any social media network.
This is not to say a spammer will not pay to access a relay and start to fire off their posting and polluting feeds. It’s only a lot less likely as spammers don’t want to spend money they might not get a return on and still have free reign on eyeballs sitting on the public relays.
Additionally, paid relays have the incentive to maintain a high standard of operation, and uptime, meaning your feeds will render faster and much smoother than using some of the clogged-up public relays. It would improve your client experience and reduce the amount of unnecessary data you need to download when dealing with public relays.
Where can I find paid relays?
If you’re looking for paid relays, several have popped up to meet nostr users’ need for a cleaner and more reliable feed. Below you’ll find some of the paid relay options available, but more are springing up daily. To start using a paid relay, you would need to make contact with the relay owner and pay them so that your public key is added to their white list and from there, you should be able to read and write to their server.
| Relay | Price (In Satoshis) | Nostr Pub Key |
|---|---|---|
| wss://relay.nostriches.org | 421 | npub1vnmhd287pvxxk5w9mcycf23av24nscwk0da7rrfaa5wq4l8hsehs90ftlv |
| wss://nostr.milou.lol | 1000 | npub1rvg76s0gz535txd9ypg2dfqv0x7a80ar6e096j3v343xdxyrt4ksmkxrck |
| wss://bitcoiner.social | 1000 | npub1dxs2pygtfxsah77yuncsmu3ttqr274qr5g5zva3c7t5s3jtgy2xszsn4st |
| wss://relay.nostr.nu | 2000 | npub1vvqnak4hz0u7vkv0vs5jp4ha0dt359cgvz4jj4y2ku85z0dtt6zq9pv3s8 |
| wss://relay.nostrati.com | 2000 | npub1qqqqqqqut3z3jeuxu70c85slaqq4f87unr3vymukmnhsdzjahntsfmctgs |
| wss://relay.nostrich.land | 2100 | npub1vj0wlergmkcs0sz7hfks2ywj555c2s87f40squ4sqcmqpr7897fqn6mfew |
| wss://relay.orangepill.dev | 4500 | npub16jzr7npgp2a684pasnkhjf9j2e7hc9n0teefskulqmf42cqmt4uqwszk52 |
| wss://eden.nostr.land | 5000 | npub16k7j4mwsqm8hakjl8x5ycrqmhx89lxkfwz2xxxcw75eav7sd8ztqy2rwdn |
| wss://nostr.inosta.cc | 5000 | npub1r34nhc6nqswancymk452f2frgn3ypvu77h4njr67n6ppyuls4ehs44gv0h |
| wss://relay.nostr.com.au | 6969 | npub1qqqqqrre3jxkuyj3s4m59usdyvm0umgm0lpy6cqjtwpt649sdews5q3hw7 |
| wss://nostr.plebchain.org | 6969 | npub1u2tehhr3ye4lv4dc8aen2gkxf6zljdpf356sgfjqfun0wxehvquqgvhuec |
| wss://nostr.decentony.com | 7000 | npub1pp9csm9564ewzer3f63284mrd9u2zssmreq42x4rtt390zmkrj2st4fzpm |
| wss://nostr.wine | 8888 | npub18kzz4lkdtc5n729kvfunxuz287uvu9f64ywhjz43ra482t2y5sks0mx5sz |
| wss://private.red.gb.net | 8888 | npub1nctdevxxuvth3sx6r0gutv4tmvhwy9syvpkr3gfd5atz67fl97kqyjkuxk |
| wss://puravida.nostr.land | 10000 | npub16k7j4mwsqm8hakjl8x5ycrqmhx89lxkfwz2xxxcw75eav7sd8ztqy2rwdn |
| wss://nostr.gives.africa | 10000 | npub1g8dcep2exsadx9smhdrgwds06pgfc9yyyww6ftdcgnyukcuzk2csqs5jed |
| wss://atlas.nostr.land | 15000 | npub12262qa4uhw7u8gdwlgmntqtv7aye8vdcmvszkqwgs0zchel6mz7s6cgrkj |
Note:
- The prices above are meant to give you an indication of the prices one could pay for access to a paid relay and are subject to change based on demand.
- If you would like to be added to this list, please reach out via email, Twitter, Nostr or drop your information in the comments section below.
How do I add myself to a paid relay?
If you find a relay you’d like to access, you can contact the relay owner directly via their public key or any contact details they provide. They will then send you a Lightning invoice to pay. Once settled, they will whitelist your public key, and you’re done.
If your relay owner is using a setup like Nostream, it would be an even more straightforward process. All you would need to do is head to their website.
- Input your public key or sign your key using your preferred Nostr Key management tool
- Pay the corresponding lightning invoice.
- Once your order is processed, grab the relay URL
- Add the URL to the relay section in your preferred client and click save
What are the types of paid relays?
It is essential to understand that nostr is new, and we’re all figuring things out as we go along. Paid relays are a natural progression for the ecosystem as resources get deployed to support it. It’s only natural that people would want to be compensated for their services.
How they are compensated is a different story; while traditional social media sells your data and fills your feed with ads, Nostr relays cannot use this model and has to look at alternatives. No one has successfully monetised a Nostr relay, so ultimately, it will be a trial-and-error process.
Paid admission.
The most popular paid relay method is the pay-per-key method because it’s so simple; you’re curating a whitelist of public keys from users who have paid you the fee you set. Paid admission is easy to understand, it’s simple to do, and relay owners get paid upfront.
Relay operators can focus on keeping their service up and of high quality and remove any remove users / public keys from the allowlist if they breach any of the Terms of Service they stipulated. This mechanism also allows operators to deter spammers since they might not make their ROI before getting banned.
Pay for storage size.
Since most of us have a pretty tiny Nostr footprint, the amount of content created over time can swell, and if you want to keep an archive of all your posts, we might see relays support these users with a pay-per-size approach. Again this is simple and easy to understand; many of us pay for cloud storage with a provider like iCloud, AWS or Azure, which unlocks a certain amount of storage based on how much we are willing to pay.
Relays could set up accounts for these archival or power users and charge them based on the amount of storage they have used.
Pay per event/publish.
Not every user is going to want to shell out a one-time fee or a recurring fee to use a social media service; they might be “light” users who only post on occasion and only read what’s going on in Nostrand.
In this case, a pay-per-event structure might be better since they only spend sats when they actually want to engage. Using Lightning or eCash as payment methods, relays could be set up with clients to allow them to bill per post, and as soon as you post, you have to pay an invoice to publish to the relay.
The pricing for this type of monetisation will be tricky as the more the user does with this relay, the more it would cost for them, and if it gets too costly, users might want to migrate to relays that offer them the once-off fee.
How do I set up my own paid relay?
If the idea of a paid relay sounds interesting to you, and you’d like to spin one up to support your local community and push the Nostr ecosystem forward, then here’s a great guide by Andre Neves. If nostr does take off and more people flock to the network, having a paid relay could transition from being a hobby to being a business.
When you combine running a relay with a lightning routing node, you might have a way to generate a regular income from the growing bitcoin and nostr ecosystem.
Do your own research.
If you’d like to try out Nostr or want to learn more about it, we recommend checking out the following resources to kickstart your research.
Are you on Nostr?
If you are a Nostr user and want to hang out and chat with us or follow our content on your preferred Nostr front end, feel free to add us using our PubKey below.
7ecd3fe6353ec4c53672793e81445c2a319ccf0a298a91d77adcfa386b52f30d
The Bitcoin Manual’s Nostr Pubkey
Give us your notes
If you have used Nostr, which client do you prefer and why? Are there any clients that you think deserve mention? Let us know in the comments down below.
