connected but mostly independent groups are much harder to herd and centralize. it makes us more powerful when one trick can only corrupt one of our circles but others are not vulnerable to it. making people into sausages is the first step in subjugating them, and that requires isolating them all from each other. when the ways to do that differ radically, or even are opposite between two independent but weakly connected groups, the tradeoffs for an attack on one, strengthen the other. it's more amorphous than this in practice, but this is what large numbers of highly self-directed people operate towards the same cause in different ways. nostr is like this. connected end to end, but highly clustered around quite a number of different cultural and ethnic groups. i sit here on the gnostic/cypherpunk zone, and nearby me are catholics, protestants, muslims, and on the other side i am near the more agnostic and atheist. there isn't one way to expose any of such a wide variety of philosophies to an efficient, scalable attack. we may not be as effective as a uniform mass of marxist trained dupes but war against us does not scale.