This guy almost gets Nostr.
Discussion
It is a very good question if your database is actually a damn server already anyway. People have tried to address it in the traditional world before, with things like CouchDB, Firebase, Postgrest, Supabase and the "local-first" community.
Nostr is that but also adds the fact that you are actually talking to a ton of different databases that you don't control.
The truly interesting difference is in authentication.
In traditional servers, OAuth tokens are used to protect database write access, because all the rules of the app are made up and stored in the database itself. So the database itself is the "protected resource".
On Nostr, the database is public and open. It has no fantasies, just data. The "protected resource" is actually the user's private key. So authentication is reversed. The server demands authorization from the client rather than vice-versa. Truly mind blowing for anyone stuck in web dev for the past 20 years.
you can also go full on database-less when building an app. app has a keypair and can rw encrypted state data to relays. I did this in a PoC strava bridge where I stored app data on public relays. pretty paradigm shifting.
This approach needs to be leaned into more
🎯
To be fair this is true for all "web3" in general. from Bitcoin wallets to ethereum dApps to nostr
I've always considered the DB to be the backend 🤔
