I suspect there will be many new ways to fetch notes in the future (p2p overlay networks), etc. nip01 just defining the packet is good. I picture nips branching out as a tree. Maybe there is a root node that defines social networking nips, that specifies the outbox model as the way to fetch notes for that class of applications. So in that sense I agree with @Mike Dilger ☑️ if this is what he means, but there will be other root nodes for other application domains with different ways of routing notes.

I thought you said you think of nips as an ogre, I mean onion

a similar idea was the original thought behind wikifreedia.xyz what "nostr" means might vary for different developers I had originally thought of the idea that ended up as wikifreedia as an editor where you could define what each NIP is, and, even if we got to have competing NIP implementations, at least the competing proposals could be documented. Sort of like what you have with the DIPs repo, where stuff that wasn't "accepted" into the nips repo can (and does) still exist and be easily documentable/findable.

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.