I don’t have any issue with Nostr, it honestly doesn’t interest me very much at all. But since it came up, let me tell you a little anecdote:

A few months ago I opened the Wikipedia article on Nostr, which states in the last sentence of the overview that:

Nostr was created as a result of perceived moderation issues on Twitter, as well as both technical and cultural disagreements with other protocols such as ActivityPub and Secure Scuttlebutt.

for which it cites the original blog entry where the protocol was introduced. Since I was interested in what these disagreements might be, I read through the post. And while I did find out what the criticisms of AP and SSB were, I also had a different train of thought going on too:

After reading the short summary, I thought to myself “Well that sounds like a nice hobby project, but isn’t that just BBS with crypto (and over the internet instead of telephone lines)?” That changed, however, when I read somewhere else that relays can also query other relays for their posts, after which I though “Well that sounds like a nice hobby project, but isn’t that just NNTP with crypto (and over the internet instead of usenet)?”

Again, none of this is an issue for me and I don’t really have any problems with the protocol itself but what did rub me the wrong way was that towards the end of the blog post, in the Q&A, it says the following:

This is very simple. Why hasn’t anyone done it before?

I don’t know, but I imagine […]

and idk, not actively looking for prior art seems a bit lazy to me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯