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 bluesky, activitypub? 
 Are they really rivals to Nostr tho? 

I guess the answer differs based on what you want to use Nostr for. Personally, I don't see either of them offering foundational building blocks for the new Internet. 

IMHO, only Nostr provides self-sovereign cryptographic identities, web of trust, communication layer, and persistence layer - all of which are truly open and permissionless. That's why I think that Nostr is inevitable. 
 They would claim the same things of their stack, with some reasonable validity.  I was doing single sign-on with PKI on the ActivityPub stack in 2007 (which extends to the whole semantic web, solid, DIDs, FOAF etc.).  Each system has trade-offs.  But I agree nostr has a special combination, particularly, payments.

Ultimately turing complete is turing complete.  All the stacks will end up as turing complete.  Identity is not sigular it's a key ring of relations.  Some are further ahead on this than others.  Some have politics and so on.

Like you, I'm very bullish on nostr use cases, as a form of advanced innovation.  However, other stacks have gone 10x in user base, which unlocks other things such as sustainability etc. though perhaps with added politics. 
 Are you working on your projects alone Melvin or do you have a team? 
 More like fitting 10 jigsaw pieces together, each of which has a team that I interact with.  And a little bit of my own work + glue. 
 Do you see any way we (nostr) can streamline this?

I’m as bullish as you on the protocol despite people’s whinging, but I look at the dev path and see a lot to be desired too. 
 A decent community manager would be good.  To help new devs get started, for example. 
 Could they realistically operate across different dev projects? 
 Sure, why not 
 I’m not trying to be flippant, I’m asking for future planning 
 I realize that in theory similar things can be claimed, but do you see large numbers of users actually holding their keys on these networks? If not, then we are talking about different types of networks imo. 

Also, what's your take on the diversity of apps being built on the competing networks? On Nostr, we have just about every imaginable app type being built or at least attempted. I find this to be insanely bullish for Nostr.  
 For holding keys you'd need to look at IPFS + shitcoins + DID stack.  Though DID is creeping in to alot of places.  Tons of apps there, but I consider that proprietary.  Yet there is still innovation.  When you see games get to 10 million users in a month on other platforms, you realize that nostr as big competition.  You can make the argument it's apples and oranges, but there is an intersection.  Nostr has legit competition in social, and legit competition in payments.  We of course know it's proprietary shitcoins, but the users dont.  IPFS and protocol labs have their feet in both areas with investments in activitypub projects, bluesky and also their own premined tokens.  Even just looking at the old Luna project that went bust, had a very impressive set of apps.  I dont think nostr has every imaginable app.  There are few social games (e.g. words with friends), few prediction markets, few smart contracts, few market based apps.  Lots of good twitter clients, blog clients, zap stream is great, torrents.  But we've not replaced reddit, facebook, netflix, google, dont have cutting edge AI (ok maybe openagents).  There's not a really good chat app that competes with whatsapp/telegram which quickly goes to millions of users.  Unclear how far the infrastructure can go.  There is legit competition on all fronts, nostr is a niche space with high R&D, but plenty of folks doing lots of stuff out there.  Will be fun to see how it evolves.  What is true is that nostr is in the 1000s of users, and competitors are in the millions of users. 
 I think where nostr can really shine, is with tighter bitcoin integration.  That I think is really the super power. 
 Agreed. 
 And not with custodial solutions 😏 
 10x of 10 is 100.

Is that a win? 
 I don’t see #nostr as a social media competitor. It’s more like an independent socioeconomic layer that sits on top of, but not dependent on the internet.