My understanding is that decentralized protocols need some centralization at the beginning to become truly decentralized later (sounds like a paradox) - something to coordinate people and give them the focus needed. That's why we had Satoshi, that's why I think it's good we have Ethereum Foundation. We need some institution to bootstrap these protocols, but we also have to work to make these institutions irrelevant later. Maybe Nostr's problem wasn't max decentralization itself, but premature decentralization before the protocol reached sufficient completeness?

Depends what the hard forks are for. If they are for ring-fenced deployments with some central control, such as for certain B2B or community environments, then nostr is a useful hardware store. The deployment context is what prevents the current problems from re-rearing their heads. Think how linux was designed as a consumer desktop OS but the business server market is where it found its footing. Its problem was crappy graphics and awful UX, but in the business server context who cares about that. That's what I see the nostr hardware store as useful for. Not for an "open world" hard fork, which is the context we have now, but for hard forks (or soft forks too) for controlled, ring-fenced environments. Nostr, Farcaster and the like are not the way forward for open world. As for how it ossified, everything this decentralised does. The same way SSB ossified. The same way as XMPP ossified. Recommend this article for a deeper dive on XMPP

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Reflections: The ecosystem is moving

At Open Whisper Systems, we’ve been developing open source “consumer-facing” software for the past four years. We want to share some of the t...