Relays are no different than any other hosting service in terms of incentives, they're a CDN for notes.
Some hosting services cater to illegal content, like seedbox services for torrents.
Others, like business tier S3 with a terms of service, do not.
The only difference vs. traditional hosts is that Nostr uses keys/signatures so that data is verifiable and therefore can be easily distributed across redundant hosts (exactly what torrents do by using redundant trackers with hashes to ID files).
Unlike torrents though, there's a reputational lever available in Nostr because of author keys. This will allow it to become more email-like, where servers generally drop everything that doesn't pass some checks.
Email and traditional file hosting is enured to legacy DNS/IP4 limitations, and therefore not as simple to have provider redundancy, which makes service offerings less commoditized than is possible with Nostr relays.
So, while Nostr is an improvement over legacy hosting services in terms of censorship-resistance, there's no magic that makes it a different animal in terms of incentives or how it evolves service hygiene.
Justin (shocknet)
thecto@lightning.video
npub1xvtw...64sa
Head of building shit | Lightning.Pub | ShockWallet.app | Lightning.Video/thecto
Go outside


Nostr is natures way of healing the Lightning network
I'm pleased to announce that we've finally opened the pull request for NIP-68, Lightning Debit Requests.
These ad-hoc debit requests, when combined with NIP-69 offers, provide a more intuitive, secure, and scalable successor to NWC that actually leverages Nostr for identity of Apps and Services.
Pairing an app is now as simple as entering a Lightning-enabled NIP-05 address and clicking Approve or Deny in your wallet.
The implementation is live in ShockWallet's PWA and Android build with iOS coming later this week.
A temporarily forked nostr-tools is also available for ease of integration.
Check out this UX sample:
New in ShockWallet and Lightning.Pub: Static payment codes over Nostr provide a more performant, private, trustless and decentralized replacement to LNURL and Bolt12
Play around at demo.nip69.dev