Many Many years ago. Back when Twitter was a network service for delivering text messages to flip phones (hence the small text length limit they had for many years) ... We developed a set of protocols under the Oasis Standards Organization; XRI and XDI. XRI stood for eXtensible Resource Identifier and was a an extension of the URI standard. XDI stood for XRI Data Interxhange. Philosophically XDI was similar to Nostr (as I understand it for now as a noob)... A set of protocol definitions to enable building apps on distributed data networks. We were RDF based as that was the fashion those days. Part of that work still survives in OpenId and oAuth in the form of XRDS (eXtensible Resource Discovery Service) .... But that's not the point of this post. XRI had iNames and iNumbers, human friendly and machine friendly identifiers, like IP addresses and domain names for people. These names could be dereferenced, using XRDS on a distributed resolution service (like DNS but without the ICAAN root) to find people's public keys or IDPs or Photo feed, etc... iNames came before Twitter Tags... And if you were a person and you had an iName it looked like =John. The equals sign was the person signifier (just like the @ is in Twitter... X) ... That's why to this day my username is always equalsAndy as a nod to iName =Andy.

I look forward to learning more about Nostr and seeing how I can participate:-)