Why do you think clients won't pay? Traditionally apps are made by companies and those companies pay for the services they use. What makes you say nostr is different in this regard?

Well, I have a client and won't pay. It doesn't make sense for me to pay for any service on behalf of my users. On Nostr, most clients are too small and will never have the coding structure AND the regulatory structure to make passthroughs of cash. Damus and Primal are the only ones that can do it today. All the other 200 clients can't. Lots of other service providers wanted Clients to pay. This is not a new idea. It just has never worked. Open-source is just not good for that.

We agree with the fact that Nostr is too small right now. But email was small too, but the it grew and I imagine gmail and co. use some paid services or host then themselves internally. It's so much easier for a user to relate with Amethyst, the client they use, rather than with a service provider they don't know it exists, don't know or understand what it does. Or rather, it does things that are so fundamental they never had to pay for them.

I wasn't saying that Nostr is small. I think it is a good size for any service provider to play the game. But the apps themselves are way too small for payment integrations. And they will always be small. Apps on Nostr are like Watch faces. They don't have the time to build the supporting infrastructure to redirect cash. On the second point, yes, people trust Amethyst more than a service they never heard about, but that is fixed when Amethyst recommends services in a settings page. We pass the trust we have to providers. If we just code a WoT settings screen where you are one of the providers, users will click on it and create an account with you. The better the integration, the better the capture. That's also why I think we need to have WoT-visualization clients whose only job is to "sell" how web of trust is better than everything else. Then users just need to pick a provider and use in all apps.

This is a great line of thought to come back to. Pip and Vitor are right to question whether users will pay for personalized trust metrics. The initial WoT use case is to get rid of the super obvious bad actors, and for this use case, most users will be content to use trust metrics personalized to someone else: an influencer, one of their friends, etc. At this stage, “personalization” of trust metrics would mean adjusting the parameters to case a wider or a narrower net. Brainstorm already does this. But will users pay for that? Maybe a few, but it’s not a must-have. Once the bots are gone, we turn our attention to contextual trust. This is where personalization gets more interesting. Suppose Alice is interested in sports, Bob in the latest developments in AI. They’ll want their personalized Brainstorm to keep track of everything having to do with that field — including an ever-changing ontology — and to stay up to date, which will be a complicated matter. Will users be willing to pay for this? I think some will. But what if I can piggyback on my friend’s personalized WoT for free for topics like these? Might still be a tricky sell. And then we come to the next level of complexity: privacy. This might be the hook that starts to bring in a lot of users. Maybe I want personalization of interests, AND privacy regarding who/what I’m following and why, AND I want *inviolable control over the curation* because otherwise I won’t trust the slop content being fed to me. The trick is going to be to make personalization a must-have. And not for ideologues, but for normies. A combo of personalization of interests, inviolable control that keeps out the slop, and privacy may be required to make personalized trust a must have. Which is not an intractable problem, but it will take a lot of work.