I really like the Nostr protocol, though. It's too bad the network is so inundated by cryptocurrency topics.

It's simple, it has a nice extension process (standing on the shoulders of giants), and it's super easy and lightweight to self-host. It reminds me a lot of the early days of http, when it was more common (as a developer) to telnet to port 80 and just type in a couple of lines of header and get a response.

Sadly, Nostr's association with cryptocurrency, and the fact that 90% of the traffic on it is cryptocurrency created posts, has been a severe handicap.