The point of decentralization is having options. There is no one way to use Nostr. There are already hundreds of relays to choose from. According to nostr.watch there's 427 relays online right now.
Discussion
Yup. If an agreement on etiquette is required for nostr to work, then it's already failed.
Those who think everyone is forced to listen to them on a voluntary platform are going to be disappointed, but they aren't silenced. They can always run their own relay and anyone who cares to listen to them can find their notes.
It's still early though, and censorship resistance can fail. If someone is banned by most common relays right now, it's very difficult for anyone to find them and view notes from their private relay. NIP-65 proposes a solution to this, but doesn't seem to get much attention from client devs.
There's a huge difference between being ignored, and being deplatformed. From what I've observed thus far, offensive behavior on Nostr mostly just gets ignored and the bad actors eventually give up and move on.
It's all incentives.
You can be as big of an asshole as you want to be, but that might incentivize people to stop listening to you. If you feel like your achieving whatever it is you want to achieve, then great, keep on it. Otherwise you might need to change your approach. Incentives will take care of the social etiquette in a way where no one person or group has control.
It's not that it's required. It just kind of is. There's always an agreement in etiquette between people in a social scenario. A client or relay has some terms, it's just the nature of existing. It has an operator who has a mind and so has an opinion and so has an ideology about what crosses that line.
It's not required, but we can't change what social animals we are.
