Someone: “What is the use of Nostr without zaps? It’s in the App Stores so it’s not any more decentralized than mastodon right?”

Me: “Censorship resistant communication. You can’t be blocked or censored. Muted, yes, but reply guy the shit out of anyone to your hearts contents. Zaps make “likes” have actual meaning/value. Instead of an arbitrary metric the algorithm keys off of. Compared to mastodon, nostr is way more decentralized. You can be banned from a mastodon instance and your content is lost. You get banned from a nostr relay and you hopefully were publishing to others that won’t ban you. Or you publish to your own relay to archive all your content. Then have people read from your relay if they want to hear from you.

Nostr is just the protocol. Clients that use nostr are in the App Store. There are web based, mobile, desktop clients that all work different but are nostr. There’s even a chess client for playing chess using nostr.

It’s like bitcoin. Bitcoin is just a protocol creating a network of people. Conversely, bitcoin requires network consensus so everyone largely only uses bitcoin core (bitcoind) as the base protocol implementation. For nostr, it doesn’t matter. As long as a client or relay adheres to the NIPs (protocol specs), then they can interoperate.”