But isn’t that a pretty shitty protocol then and something that should be superseded?
Discussion
Sure. There's no perfect protocol right now. All of them have serious tradeoffs/flaws.
The last thing Nostr wants to be is perfect
Perfect is the enemy of fun.
Nostr is perfectly imperfect.
And that is why it's so special. We have so much room for growth that any time the tiniest bit of iteration or improvement happens, it's like waves in a small pool.
Perfection is a weapon used to stifle the growth of grass roots movements. To be imperfect is to be human. To be human is to desire to connect, free from manipulation, warts and all.
Every day I'm amazed how such an under-engineered protocol can work so well in practice and just keeps getting better 🤯
The extensibility and scriptability (you can sign a message with a key? => you can post!) makes it even more exciting!
It's a far more battle tested one, and has at least one if not two orders of magnitude better adoption. Nostr absolutely has advantages over it, but I'm not at all convinced it's the right tech. More importantly, technical superiority has essentially zero to do with success in this space.
There are far, far technically better systems than nostr that have failed to take off for years if not decades. Adoption and network effects are all that matter, and if it wasn't for the bitcoin community adoption nostr would already be DoA.