Bit of nostr
Nostr
The Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) protocol’s top priority is resilience and it achieves this through simplicity. The protocol is scoped to only defining how to publish, relay, and read “notes” (signed strings). It is more complicated to integrate with Twitter’s API than to write a Nostr client from the ground up. Now, Twitter gives ya the super large user base and extreme real time updates…but at a cost. They are the gatekeepers.
Nostr assumes that relays will disappear at some point. So instead of relying on single points to always be available, notes are passed around between relays. Distributed storage. Relays don’t have to accept every note. They could charge per note, require proof-of-work, only whitelist certain clients…it is up to them. This allows for a diverse sea of servers and I am not sure how notes will propagate across them.
Identities are cheap, they are simply public keys. Verifying them requires more work and there isn’t just one way to do it. Users might favor different strategies for believing if a pubkey is linked to someone.