For HTTP, SSH, etc. sure. These are for building things that run in relative isolation. But for social protocols, which are the opposite of isolation (hence social) it's different. You can't disentangle the protocol from the vibe. Every such protocol develops a vibe that becomes self-reinforcing.
Except for B2B and other such relatively isolated deployments.
nostr unlike the others mentioned as "social protocols" is that on a pure technical basis nostr is a superset. It isn't restricted as a social protocol like bluesky or mastodon is.
Facebook could if they want incorporate the nostr protocols, set their systems to only use facebook servers as relays.
All the Facebook vibe would stay, their system would run on nostr. And we outside of that bubble wouldn't notice a thing: Unless they open the system.
But it would be cool tech as through the nostr protocol they could give their users more direct ownership of their data.
I see it as a user distributed database system, when I program in it. And like using it even when not doing social apps.
Facebook cannot, because Nostr has a low-key bitcoin anarchist vibe that Meta will be super wary of. Whether it’s all on Meta servers or not is irrelevant to the headlines that their PR team would have to deal with. social protocol integration decisions are rarely ever made on tech alone. It’s almost always conflated.
Another way to illustrate the conflation is the sentence “ I can’t wait to share this with Nostr!” This means something. We can all picture who might be saying this and what sort of thing about. Nobody says “ l can’t wait to share this with html”.
ActivityPub is probably about as far as Meta can go.
"I can't write to write this in html and share it on the internet." Was totally reasonable and common to say in the 90's & early 2000's.
Then the protocol level was abstracted away for the user into frontends the average user identified with: MySpace, Twitter, Reddit, etc.
The protocol level of nostr can totally be abstracted away into both existing services as well as new ones. As a matter of fact there are already multiple services where I'd argue it already happened.
Happened where? Filter out the clever bots and there are maybe 10,000 people using Nostr per day, and that hasn't changed for 2+ years. In fact numbers of genuine users might even be down from this point two years ago.
Where is this growth among non-Bitcoin, non-Nostr people happening at any scale beyond a few people kicking a few tires then giving up on seeing all this content about Bitcoin and Nostr, things they don't care about?
