this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2025
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Nostr is a weird being. You are correct that it is not peer-to-peer like Monero is. However, it's not quite federated in the same way that ActivityPub is.
When using Nostr clients, you actually publish your same data to like six different relays at the same time. It has the built-in assumption that some of those relays are going to be down at any given time and so by publishing to like six at once you get data redundancy.
Ok, so it's effectively the same as P2P, just with some guarantees about how many copies you have.
In a P2P setup, your data would be distributed based on some mathematical formula such that it's statistically very unlikely that your data would be lost given N clients disconnect from the network. The larger the network, the more likely your data is to stick around. So think of bittorrent, but you are randomly selected to seed some number of files, in addition to files you explicitly opt into.
The risk w/ something like Nostr is if a lot of people pick the same relays, and those relays go down. With the P2P setup I described, data would be distributed according to a mathematical formula, not human decision, so you're more likely to still have access to that data even if a whole country shuts off its internet or something.
Either solution is better than Lemmy/Mastodon or centralized services in terms of surviving something like AWS going down.