I have never asked for a donation but here it goes: I host 4 relays now completely for free, they will always be free, on top of doing thousands of hours of open source work. I've never received a grant, I'm running purely on passion and principles here. If you are enjoying my relays (WoT, Haven, Algo) - please consider making a donation to help cover the costs of my servers and bandwidth - the costs really add up πŸ«‚πŸ™ /end e-begging

Replies (57)

Why not go the nostr.wine route and require payment? You'll be helping the market with price discovery and enable your operation to scale. It's an essential step for Nostr to mature. If I were you I'd start at what seems high since there's little competition. Say 33k ($30) a month.
That's a good thing because it helps us get to the truth of the matter. We should not gaslight ourselves thinking we have a reliable system when it requires not only passion but charity. v4v is an aesthetic but reality operates on mass (users) and energy (money).
SoapMiner's avatar
SoapMiner 1 year ago
utxo the webmaster πŸ§‘β€πŸ’»'s avatar utxo the webmaster πŸ§‘β€πŸ’»
I have never asked for a donation but here it goes: I host 4 relays now completely for free, they will always be free, on top of doing thousands of hours of open source work. I've never received a grant, I'm running purely on passion and principles here. If you are enjoying my relays (WoT, Haven, Algo) - please consider making a donation to help cover the costs of my servers and bandwidth - the costs really add up πŸ«‚πŸ™ /end e-begging
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Hopefully you're not rejected for the same reason as Freerse. The #[4] board wanted a nice green GitHub stat sheet. We'd been building the product locally for the previous year and a half. They don't care if your product is used and if Nostr's users like it.
The secret is a nice green GitHub spreadsheet. The board of directors of #[4] determines your proof of work based on this scrap of paper, not on user love and the code you have built.
I'd bet if you complain about it a few dozen more times your app will get a unique feature that's worth funding! πŸ™„
I honestly don’t know if I use any of those relays but doesn’t matter, I am 100% supportive of the passion and principles, so thank you for doing what you do.
So what? If you plan to shut the relays down on a whim, why should people donate? If you plan to fight to bring them back if something brought them down, just not necessarily the same day or week, tell us so and we will not complain if it's down a day or two. Also something being free doesn't stop people from complaining when it goes away, so it's all in your head. I would prefer if you charged for things that are easy to charge for, namely relays. If people pay for that, you at least know why and when to scale them up. The zaps here should be for what's less constant and less directed to specific users.
Rom hasnβ€˜t been build in a day and with this amount collected (biggest fundraiser ever on Nostr?) maybe its a starting point. I agree with what you are saying, paying for a service at a certain point because if you don’t who is the product then? Just the way it is and why should it be different here A normal user PS: we should also reflect what happened here, maybe its already β€žnormalβ€œ for some but looking at this from a birdview, its pretty amazing to see the community pulling together like this and having the technology and ability no middleman! Pretty awesome I reckon this should be put in the hall of fame, archived for generations to come.
Datil's avatar
Datil 1 year ago
A combination of honesty humility & pragmatism.
I havent tried the relays yet but I appreciate you! Seems like a lot of other do to πŸ’œ
Ask and it will be given to you. There’s no shame in asking. I see your value. Appreciate you. πŸ«‚
Gale Rush's avatar
Gale Rush 1 year ago
Not begging; this is #value4value. You are providing value, people should return what value they can based upon the value they recieve. It's called a #valueask. No Agenda has been run that way for over a decade, (great podcast btw).
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