Nostr is deceptively tricky to understand. It is not hard, but the issue is that odds are that you think you get it, whilst you actually dont. To be clear, it took me a while to get it right in my head, and that is as someone who has been thinking about protocols and distributed compute crap long before Nostr was a thing, and was in direct conversation with the jungle spirit. I am superduperultramegaturbo smart (as well as funny and humble), so i am not calling anyone stupid here.

People stumble over the relay part.

Both these things apply to Nostr:

A: The specific relay does not matter;

B: The specific relay is all that matters.

Using signatures to tamperproof (1) the data, as well as a basic set of queries and indexing (2), gives us:

1: the event is the event, regardless where it came from, so it could be any relay.

2: every clients should work with any relay; any relay should work with any client.

But! Thats just this abstract technical substrate of interoperability. Its NIP-01, something that fits on a hand full of pages, and cant be expected to be the answer to all the things. Any real questions and issues that pop up when creating for an usecase needs more than that. And in large part, thas answer lies with the relays.

Where data is stored; who can access it and why? All these questions lead us to it mattering a lot what the specific relay is. A relay is someones computer, its their physical machine. They own it, they controll it, they decide who can enter, what they can leave behind and for how long, and what it hands back to you.

It matters that its the left handed one-eyed neo-eco-monarchist frog enthousiast relay; and you right handed people are not welcome. It matters what someones inbox relay is, if you want to make sure that person sees you post. It matters what a relays retention policy is if you want to keep your stuff around for a long time.

In theory things are interoperable and interchangeable; but in practice they are all individual servers, owned by different people, run for different reasons, with varying purposes.

And that was always at the core of the matter; a 'platform' is a specific server, run by specifc people. And we were forced into a tug-of-war between all of us (be that users, advertisers or governments), because we were all silo'd and stuck on that 1 computer, because we lose sight of eachother the moment we are not all together on that 1 computer.

Nostr does not magically make it not someone's computer, with the associated rights, responsibilities and privileges that come allong with it being their computer. All Nostr does is put all those servers on an interoperable substrate such that we can freely associate without an outside party comming in between, in a way we won't lose sight of eachother and freedom to choose and use whatever app/client/software we want.

The archipelago of private islands, the waters are open, pick your ship, chose your destiny.