It’s worth noting that the use of relays instead of a centralized server actually mimics the cryptocurrency obsessed Nostr platform, which might explain why the original post is from montero.town. Of course, there’s nothing inherently evil or even Crypto Bro about that architecture, and I think it would work better for E2EE messaging than a public-facing concept (because Nostr servers should, in theory, just retain everything that gets vomited onto it forever, while E2EE messaging can simply self-destruct if messages aren’t sent within a period of time).

This architecture shares several things in common with Session, but with several notable improvements:

• Forward secrecy exists, so an attacker can’t grab one key of yours and decrypt two weeks worth of messages
• Backup and restore exists, so you can actually migrate your content database from one device to another
• Your messages are not all tied to a single identity, especially if you decide to use different identities in different groups

And of course, compared to something like Signal:

• You don’t need to identify yourself with a phone number, or anything really

Of course, there are still some downsides:

• Despite being decentralized, all relays are currently run by the same group, so if you’re worried about them grabbing your IP address it could still happen
• Identity management is still really confusing and convoluted, it seems trivially easy to impersonate someone. (Please correct me if I’m wrong here, but I don’t think you can tell if a person in your DMs is the same as a person in a group, even if they are trying to use the same profile)
• In theory, lack of identity could also open pathways for excessive abuse… This is something that developers will probably have to figure out, to prevent things as harmless as annoying spammers