Explain to them that unlike mastodon, a nostr relay is a bucket of messages, nostr relay just stores messages/events. Nostr is not a network where relays send all events to eachother, they only store what is given to them directly.

But unlike Mastodon where user identities are attached to servers and servers have a degree of control over registered users, Nostr is a lot more open in that regard. There are two components at play on Nostr: clients and relays. Each user runs a client, while anyone can run a relay. Clients can publish data (create posts) on any number of relays and fetch data from other relays.

Each user is assigned a public key. When a user follows someone, the user’s client fetches posts associated with that someone’s public key from the associated relay. This process is repeated on start-up, with the client querying data from all relays it knows for all users it follows. The fetched data is then displayed to the user chronologically to make up a feed.

such an implementation solves several flaws that other platforms suffer from. On Mastodon, when a server shuts down, your data and account are completely deleted. However, on Nostr, since users are identifiable by public keys and are not really tied to relays (servers) if a relay shuts down or gets deleted, they can always move to another relay. This benefits censorship-resistantce, If a user gets banned from a relay, they can publish posts to another.