This is genius. I've been thinking about various other applications that wouldn't operate well on the network as-is. I'm thinking beyond "social media protocol" and into "decentralized and distributed (platform-less) cross-application persistent identity, media storage and retrieval, and information security". Replace and tear down gatekeeping for MLS (real estate for those not familiar), for community governance (more secure and psudonymized voting, likely with a different npub), for commercial networking and markets with tiered profile structures, etc.

Having the option to branch the protocol to specialize into other applications that would simply not work well on a social-first paradigm would make these other ideas actually feasible.

Another reason I think this is the future is because AI is taking over so many spaces, but AI can't fake digital signatures, and the signing paradigm of Nostr is a shield against it.