For the same reason nocoiners exist. I could ask why didn't you use bitcoin before you thought bitcoin was useful? Because people improve.
Discussion
What non-social thing are you most excited about that will be built with Nostr?
Well of course GitNestr which we are building ourselves with our team. A nostr client for code development. Truly sovereign code, repositories are stored on hornet relays.
Isn’t that also social in nature though? What about code development needs a relay and Nostr except that you want others to interact in the development process? It sounds useful and like a cool idea. But it also just sounds like a social client for code development.
Sure, there's a big social aspect to it. Even more than there is on GitHub right now. But the core functionality is maintaining extremely censor-resistant code repositories.
Yea that makes sense. I think it’s just a matter of reframing it for me. When I hear people mention non-social “other stuff” of Nostr, I think what they really mean is “non-Twitter-clone stuff” lol. But even Twitter is now trying to incorporate “other stuff” into their network. So it’s more a closed vs. an open and censorship-resistant approach to bringing the social web to everything.
Global machine pub/sub seems interesting. Transaction/psbt signing coordination is developing. Shortwave was the old way to get a message heard across the globe. Now it's machine readable via internet.
Why weren't people doing it before nostr? Well, the network of relays is important. I think nostr makes it easier by boiling it down to signed and broadcasted messages. There may have been ways to use email or some other relay network to accomplish the same thing, but maybe not so simply.