"Nostr is Freedom Tech"
People, who joined the social web later like to think that the decentralization of Nostr is what makes it 'freedom tech'. In fact, that's a big myth.
The web technology that has given us the most freedom, we already have since 1999. It's called web servers, http(s), blog CMS and ping APIs. Decentralized at the core of the internet.
Nostr is basically just posting text and media, same as 𝕏. The only innovation is being able to zap posts (= send Sats via Lightning). Zaps could be implemented as a CMS plugin too. It's not an exclusive feature of nostr. It's just a matter of demand.
Discoverability
Nostr is much worse than 𝕏 when it comes to finding other accounts to follow. 𝕏 is really good at this. But weblogs had trends and recommendations, too. There were dedicated server apps for that which you could connect to with your CMS (like Technorati, weblogs.com and many more). This feature in itself was decentralized. You could choose which one to use and opt-in and out of them by changing a simple ping setting in your CMS. You could literally decide, not to appear on any trend lists, if you wanted to.
That's full control.
Nostr clients are now pathetically trying to implement these features at the client level. There is no other way anyway. And you can't opt out.
Full control over your data
Speaking of full control, another claim by nostr ... you don't have full control over your data here. That's also a myth.
Your posts are stored in relays. You can't expect relays to store everyone's posts forever. Could be that the oldest posts will be deleted at some point. To prevent this you need to run your own relay or pay for a service that does it for you. Only few people know this. Some people will be surprised when maybe after 10 years they sentimentally look for their first post and it's gone.
Full control not only means being censorship resistant but also being able to delete what you've posted. It's called 'the right to be forgotten' and it's considered an essential right on the web.
On Nostr: you depend on relays whether they allow you to delete your post. And there are hundreds of them synchronized with each other. If only one relay doesn't play along with your deletion request, your post is still out there somewhere.
On 𝕏: Well, you can delete your post and hide it from other's view. But can you be sure, it's really deleted from everywhere? From their other data storages and backups, too? At least you can hide it from search engines and web archives, which is not possible on Nostr.
Weblogs: It's your server, your .htaccess, your robots.txt (most search engines respect a robots.txt), your CMS and database. This is actually real control over creation, modification, storage, backup and deletion of your data. Unbeaten until today.
Conclusion
Self-hosted weblogs run by open source CMS already give us maximum data control and freedom. So why do we now need relays for that? It's convenience and a spiritual legacy from the centralized platforms.
Convenience is what made users run to centralized social media platforms and give up freedom and control to begin with.
Nostr social media a minimally better, but you still don't have the full package of what the internet has to offer.
