Keys are meaningless

A common misconception of technologists when they first discover Nostr is to put too much weight on the cryptography and start worshipping the keypairs.

Secret keys are just numbers. To some people this will sound amazing, but in fact it is just a little boring. Numbers by themselves don't do anything. A simple computer script can generate a bazillion keys with no effort at all: but does that have any effect in the world? No.

The key-focused approach to Nostr is responsible for well-known slogans such as "not your keys, not your notes" or "self-sovereign identity". But these are meaningless slogans, and not only because people are not keys, but because these keys don't do anything without the means of actual action in the world.

Is a person locked in a cage "free"? If you use the key-worshipper logic then yes. That locked person is the only one who can move their own body or think their own thoughts, in the same sense that a person with a secret key is the only one who can sign things using that key (obviously). Both are "self-sovereign", blablabla.

The point is that "sovereignty" (what an unfortunate word) is meaningless if the person cannot leave the cage and do more interesting things in the world. In the same sense having a key is meaningless if you cannot publish messages to where the people you're trying to reach can read them.