Obscurity is at odds with discoverability and reach because obscurity abhors continuity.

I’m with you on that, as I think many others are. If you walk the “other stuff” path, it’s not censorship resistance or dissident communication, it’s more like self sovereign publishing. A 3rd mode, a blogging renaissance (now with video!), which is also fantastic for a certain type of creative. I have however come to the conclusion that the event schema drives relay design, and it’s a blocker, not enabler. A giant serialized string with an array of undocumented tags is no way to live. It’s worth considering, if you were going to give ground on keys (identity), relays, or schema, which would you be willing to allow for other standards or services?

Not really from a design standpoint since a single company/team dictates the schema. Interoperability is not on their mind. In the case if nostr, people are not using tags not just for content discovery, they are using them for application logic.

Interoperability and plain text is great, that’s not the argument I’m making. Application logic is how arrays are used to encode things that are application specific in the arrays of notes. ["p", "<pubkey>", "spam"] ["e", "<event_id>", "illegal"] ["r", "wss://relay.example.com", "read"] ["r", "wss://other.relay.com", "write"] ["p", "<pubkey>", "<relay_url_hint>", "<petname>"] To your point, is nostr a messaging protocol or a social media protocol or a payments protocol or an identity protocol or a publishing protocol. Hard to be all of them all at once.