Nostr is definitely worse in terms of features and content, but it’s probably better overall. Soapbox is better because of emoji reacts and quote posts.
Discussion
The twitter refugees that went to mastodon and gave up likely never even tried soapbox or the good mobile apps. Search Engine Optimization for the fedi has been fucked since the media blitz of 2017. Also the walled garden instances joinmastodon.com funneled them into probably didnt tell them about soapbox on purpose.
Also, a lot of the people here came from twitter and in many ways nostr is more similar to it than the fedi is. We can't really compare instances to relays because there's no real loyalty to them here. People publish to as many as they know about and (hopefully) pull down posts from just a few. Whereas on fedi people identify with their instance and the instances close to them and communities form. Communities on Nostr are more like twitter. Just like minded posters in a giant public pool with no clear boundary. I'm not sure nostr will ever replicate what the fedi has, and I think thats ok
The pool is not that giant here because you have to choose what relays to see posts from and the web clients don’t work with many relays. Federation and user discovery better on fedi
Thats kind of the idea behind posting to several. We may not read from the same relays for each feed but my posts are still highly available
Finding people for me so far hasn't been too big of a problem
