Right now NIPs are hosted via a Github Repo. This is helpful in many ways because there’s one publicly-accessible way to read NIPs and get started contributing. By the nature of this being a code repository under source control, there are a small group of folks that are able to “approve” updates to NIPs.

The nature of projects like Nostr (or Bitcoin in the early 2010s for that matter) is that the early folks often need some control over the direction to make sure that the project has a chance to become self-sustaining without imploding into chaos.

The debate in the linked thread seems to be stemming from the timeless question for protocols, which is “how much should the protocol be able to do?” and that’s generally decided by early devs and those that control the generally accepted version of the spec for the protocol. That’s currently the NIPs repo, so who gets to “approve” NIPs in that repo?

Here’s hoping we can find a collaborative place to land that preserves the heart of nostr and maximizes its chance of success 💪