Sarah Jamie Lewis on Nostr: "it's a protocol" in the historical sense: there is an agreed upon written that ...

"it's a protocol" in the historical sense: there is an agreed upon written that details packet structure, packet flows and expected participant behaviour. There are a myriad of independent implementations.

"it's a protocol" in the modern sense: a very active repository containing a "reference implementation" that serves as a de-facto common dependency because whatever it does is the correct behaviour, and it's far too complicated for anyone to consider maintaining an independent implementation.