Ok, that’s a good argument. I agree that most users currently can’t run their own instances. Would you say that most users are able to hop on NOSTR and just get going? My impressions are that no, there’s a rather steep learning curve to get started on there as well.

So on the one hand there’s NOSTR, which would need some work to provide a more streamlined experience to the masses… Or super simple fediverse instance creation, which would need some work to provide a simple and robust experience to the masses.

The fediverse has a learning curve. Nostr is not more complicated. Instead of having a username and password you have just a password. Most clients allow you to generate this key and give a default list of relays. So it already is pretty easy. It will get easier as time goes on. This is up to the nostr community to prove but I believe it will.

Why NOSTR, why re-invent the wheel? If the biggest issue with the fediverse is setting up single-user instances; why not create simpler, self-hosted instance solutions?

Because you are still beholdin to amazon, domain name servers and it cost money that has to go through banks. Almost no one is ever going to do that. And what nostr really is is the easy self hosted fediverse solution. Nostr is the technical solution to making it easy to self host your instance. Your instance is your private key.

IMO the step beyond federation is P2P, not more fragmented federation. Stuff like Briar. RetroShare. ZeroNet.

I need to read about those but, Nostr was born from the failure of PSP solutions. In particular scultllebutt. In the readme for nostr it specifically says because it's not p2p it actually works. There are some p2p solutions in nostr already. Messages contain suggested relays and stuff like that.