How is the “open” social graph nostr’s game changer? This has been part of social networks since the beginning. 

Granted, there is a tension between having open and private relationships… (and nostr does have potential to be the social “identity management” layer of the internet) but I don’t see this as threatening to Nostr’s value as a protocol for distributed identity management (on the social web).

Fact is: Social graphs have been a part of social media since it’s inception. While nostr’s open architecture has potential to revolutionize this, it is hardly itself nostr’s value prop. 

Also fact: people want privacy. Private groups are a thing. Without private relationships as well, people will just use private anon accounts. Thank god for nostr to support truly anon accounts. 

Nostr’s value to the internet is in respecting people’s privacy while preserving their data integrity and sovereignty across any app. Private follow lists fall right into this value prop, despite the obvious challenge of keeping social graphs meaningful and accessible.  

 I think the thing Nostr does is make the social graph an accessible, inherent part of the protocol itself.  It used to be the social graph was accessible only through propriety APIs, but since Nostr is an open protocol, that social graph is now available to any application using the protocol.

Of course, that is the exact reason why one would want privacy, but fortunately there are a number of possible ways of preserving privacy, not least of which is anonymity.