Decentralized is the only word that comes to mind for me, as well.
Nostr CAN operate in a P2P way. For instance, if I use a relay I control as my DM inbox relay, and you do too, then we can DM P2P. I would write my notes to you directly to your DM inbox, and you would write to mine. It's a very small percentage of Nostr users who do this, though, I'm sure.
It's even less likely when it comes to public notes that users want the rest of the network to be able to see. Folks are generally just using public relays or web-of-trust relays operated by others for this purpose. Outbox model makes it theoretically possible to go P2P for these notes, too, such that your client would pull notes from a user's own relay when you want to see what they posted, but doesn't require it to work that way.
So Nostr is a stateless, decentralized protocol for censorship resistant publishing through redundancy of data.
Dikaios1517
npub1ku…v3lhe
2025-04-10 00:16:15
in reply to nevent1q…06yq
Author Public Key
npub1kun5628raxpm7usdkj62z2337hr77f3ryrg9cf0vjpyf4jvk9r9smv3lhePublished at
2025-04-10 00:16:15Event JSON
{
"id": "e4fe85c4e077f5d2312be48a2e381c3e5c300f49b89d924ccefc7adb5b6bf19a",
"pubkey": "b7274d28e3e983bf720db4b4a12a31f5c7ef262320d05c25ec90489ac99628cb",
"created_at": 1744244175,
"kind": 1,
"tags": [
[
"p",
"df478568479de26b4a83c1bdc4dbab61b5cc82e1a312e2b28bc815a12a951e67",
"wss://nos.lol/",
"Marc"
],
[
"p",
"bf95e1a45bd5ec5ca0d420f4f55cd01645c7849f57fdd13b8c5afec4ebdcc848",
"wss://purplepag.es/",
"BitcoinInfinity"
],
[
"e",
"ecceee93d8251757abe46708f8f649c31f59c59056e68be00d7a592b8c3fcfff",
"wss://relay.nostr.net/",
"root"
],
[
"e",
"ce4cff58f1b4c6e09e54ff0c42de2d5af3b004c836f9c3ebd4b9db3a43c83410",
"ws://192.168.18.7:7777",
"mention"
],
[
"e",
"b85695e94415b054e46b0fb870ae2d9e013ef0d9c591afd7fef330aeef207d73",
"wss://relay.damus.io/",
"reply",
"df478568479de26b4a83c1bdc4dbab61b5cc82e1a312e2b28bc815a12a951e67"
]
],
"content": "Decentralized is the only word that comes to mind for me, as well.\n\nNostr CAN operate in a P2P way. For instance, if I use a relay I control as my DM inbox relay, and you do too, then we can DM P2P. I would write my notes to you directly to your DM inbox, and you would write to mine. It's a very small percentage of Nostr users who do this, though, I'm sure.\n\nIt's even less likely when it comes to public notes that users want the rest of the network to be able to see. Folks are generally just using public relays or web-of-trust relays operated by others for this purpose. Outbox model makes it theoretically possible to go P2P for these notes, too, such that your client would pull notes from a user's own relay when you want to see what they posted, but doesn't require it to work that way.\n\nSo Nostr is a stateless, decentralized protocol for censorship resistant publishing through redundancy of data.",
"sig": "e64a08566738b0e3aa3e31e8cb77c7589ff9b0b5beba810aad0aa00c219340f0e1bd284b24270995ae783051fe7a4937616d1fc87b36962e3b661177f4e47116"
}