Since discovering bitcoin, I've been on a journey to find my bitcoin community. I have a few friends that are bitcoiners, but I wanted to be part of something bigger, to network, learn, help grow the ecosystem. About 5 months ago I found nostr, and immediately could tell something was different here, people were helping each other, not afraid to ask questions, building things, I would get thorough responses to my posts, it was amazing. But there was a major issue. Since nostr is decentralized, and all the 'notes' are stored on nodes, there was no spec or solution for images. I'm a very visual person, I had to fix this. I built a simple image uploader for myself, and after a few days of seeing people struggle finding a way to upload images, decided to offer it to friends and followers. It was all fun and games for a few weeks, getting about 50-100 images uploaded a day, but then it exploded to 3000+ uploads a day in just a few months. I was extremely excited to not only find my community, but to contribute to it in such a big way. I knew I was taking a risk, I quickly added a ToS, but to me it is worth it for what nostr is providing, decentralized, censor resistant, free speech. I will take that risk and fight for our 1st amendment rights.
nostr.build was never meant to be a business. I only wanted to contribute to a community with something I knew how to do. But because of the sheer amount of people I was dealing with, feature requests, safety concerns, operating expenses, trying to support nostr, Bitcoin and the 1st as much as I can, like it or not, it has turned into a business. By popular request, I built an account system that allows users to save their favorite content, any size or type of media, in a very awesome dashboard, and quickly grab links to share. I charge a small annual amount for this service, and I would say it's getting pretty close to covering costs, but I have not accumulated any kind of reserves or profit, it is basically month-to-month, doesn't cover unexpected costs, like certain dev work, services, data-out spikes, attacks, etc.
About a week ago, May 18-25, the largest bitcoin conference in the wold was held in Miami. Of course, nostr was a huge topic with a lot of attention. Not initially snapping at the potential in traffic, I checked costs on my server, and data-out was spiking into overages, plus $100 just on that day, $80 the day prior, and it was only the 22nd with 9 days to go until the end of the month. I posted a chart of the spikes and mentioned that I would have to cancel all video until the end of the month, since that has the highest data-out. I hated doing that, it is not what I believe, I never ever want to cancel a link for any reason..
I did't ask for donations or Zaps. I didn't post a bill, any dollar amounts, or create any kind of fund raiser. I only stated that data-out was incredibly high and going into overages. And the SATs started pouring in. It was non stop for the following few hours. I was humbled, I've never had anything like that happen to me before, from so many strangers. I am used to working for money, I don't take donations, I wanted to tell people to stop, but knew I could use it to better support the future of nostr. In less than 24 hours, I received about 1.2mil SATs from over 120 people, some donating over 100-200k sats, that almost exactly covered the overages in my bill. All at the same time, as I type this, I found a trusted partner that has been working furiously on updating nostr.build's infrastructure to better support bursts and greatly reduce costs. He is completely rebuilding the server from scratch, adding to a load balanced system an object based repository to store images, and fixing everything else as he goes.
My story is one of many like it here. It is not just me and nostr.build, or a 'devs only' thing, but I've seen successful financial support for people's travel needs, for well produced videos and content, for other projects, advertising purposes, for gifts, creative ways to disburse/distribute, and more. What is the magic? How is this possible? How could so many decentralized, conspiracy theorists, be so generous? I'm not exactly sure, but removing all of the middle-men, advertisements and 'big money' manipulation probably has something to do with it. I've never seen or been a part of anything like nostr before. Any time I start to have any kind of doubt, or think things are slowing, I am proven wrong. Godspeed nostr, the world needs you.