Ok, this makes sense. I must have been using a client that had 'Zap' icons and because I didn't have a Zap balance I just assumed the buttons didn't work because I had no balance.
I didn't realize every single person who downloads a zap-supporting client had to also set up a separate app to handle the micro-transactions and host that app somewhere where it is available 24/7 in case their post gets zapped.
Peer discovery and peer suggestions are not implemented yet. People have been posting their public keys on twitter etc. There is a proposal for encoding a set of followers/followed in a message which your followers' clients can then use to display info about that on your profile. That should help with peer discovery once someone codes it up. You can also find threads that people are widely commenting on (e.g. someone might post a nostr thread on twitter) and follow people who post in those threads.
It's not so much peer discovery, rather the nice thing about Twitter compared with a newsletter or a blog is that you get a post and different people responding and interacting with it.
I guess some level of interaction will be needed to replicate the things people look for in Twitter. I guess a very basic functionality that that would cover this would be posting in your timeline "responses" to other posts by including the key of the other author and the cryptographic signature of the post. From that a client would be able to obtain the "parent" post and build a thread.
You can reply to posts. Retweets and likes are not yet supported but they should be easy -- likes can be a reply with just a heart emoji and clients then display those via a counter. Retweets will probably be a new message that contains a link to a prior message and clients will then display it in a twitter-esque manner.
Correct. Spam is not a problem yet because nostr is super new and no one uses it yet. But a few friendly bots have been released for it (since it's very bot-dev friendly) and DMs are open by default (and the branle client has no way to close them) so spam is basically guaranteed to come eventually.
I think p2p techniques are distinguished by being "serverless," that is, you don't publish content to someone else's device, you host your content on your own device and people have to connect to your device to get your content. Peers talk directly to other peers. In nostr and other client/server models like mastodon, you publish content on someone else's server and if you go offline people can still access it.
The difference with nostr is lots of redundancy -- you post your content to like 5 servers so that if one goes down you're not really censored, people still get your content and -- in your list of relays -- you replace the censorious one and then your followers update where they follow you at.
It's not decentralized yet but only potentially decentralized if a lot of people run relays. Currently there are only about seven relays powering the whole network: https://nostr-registry.netlify.app/
Luckily, relays are very lightweight and easy to run so maybe it will eventually get decentralized.
then you can't be zapped
you can only be zapped if your profile has a tag in it that tells people where to send your zaps to
without that, a zap button shouldn't show up, and if it does show up, it shouldn't do anything