Where is the center?  Point to the center.  Is it github (which still has NIP-26 in all its glory)?  Is it fiatjaf?  Is it the gossip client, a client that seems to never show up on anybody's lists of nostr clients?  Is it Damus? Where do you think the center is that compels us all to follow and fall in line?

I don't think there is anything that demands anybody do anything any particular way... but nevertheless there is a common desire among all of us to be compatible somehow.  So there will be communication and attempts to align.  And there will be push and pull. And some issues will probably never be agreed among all the developers.

I prefer to think of us all on the surface of a sphere.  There is no center to the surface of a sphere.  But some of us align more closely with some people than we do with others.  (strictly speaking for highly technical people, especially AI people: the sphere has many more than 3 dimensions... perhaps 1536).

Nobody told me to remove this feature from gossip. And I am not taking orders from anybody. I am funded by OpenSats but they accepted my proposal and never gave me any feedback or suggestions or direction at all, other than bitcoin.

There is no secret cabal controlling nostr. There are just a bunch of different people with different opinions who want our shit to basically be compatible.  New people show up all the time and by their work alone they become prominent nostr people. For example, the 2nd biggest contributor to the nips repo is Asai Toshiya, someone I know almost zilch about (I barely recognize the name).  By this person's work he became prominent.  That is all that matters to me.  If you do good work, create good shit, you become valuable and listened to by a higher proportion of other devs, which makes your work become the accepted thing which appears centralized but isn't at all centralized. Getting other devs to accept your idea is a prize that is up for grabs all of the time and requires the work not just of inventing something good, but all the free speech that goes into explaining it and selling it. And if you convince a lot of other devs you get more compabitility. If you don't you look towards someone else's solution that did gain more ground and maybe choose it instead. Win some, lose some.

This is an entirely distributed process.

Don't forget to take your medicine. 

 Leaving the personal attacks to one side, I'll ask you a simple question.

Who controls the protocol? 

 Write a client and send any stream of bytes you wish to any machine you wish.  Now ask yourself the question, who controlled you?  Whatever the answer to that question is, that is the answer to your question. 

 Deprecating optional features centralizes power by reducing choices, increasing control, and enforcing uniformity, making users dependent on the central authority.  

 Apparently you want to control the protocol.  But no, you cannot tell me what to do with my client.  GFY. 

 There are zero logical connections between each step in your thinking.  This is a sign of psychosis or mania.  I'm serious:  take your medicine. 

 You used the term "EVERY VOICE" (all caps yours) meaning you speak for every voice.  You dont.  And in fact there was dissent.  So we can agree to differ, you are never going to get me to believe an untruth. 

 EVERY VOICE means every voice that I was hearing about this topic.  All conversations I had encountered about this topic led me to believe nobody supported it except gossip and nobody planned to support it.  So because all I ever heard was negative, and it was hard to maintain, I took it out.

Every voice most definitely does not mean I speak for every voice.

Please take your medicine.