In Nostr, each relay can set its own policies. Relays can and do establish policies for acceptable behaviours.
Sure, but it's still each relay admin playing whack a mole with bigots as they pop up with new accounts.
On AP, because identities are tied to instances, the instance admin can kick the bigot and they're gone for everyone, before many folk ever see it. And if there is an instance with admins that don't deal with bigots, the admins can defederate from the entire instance.
Nostr doesn't give you any of those options. An instance is just a generic relay. No community, no differentiation, no protection for vulnerable folk. Which is fine if your goal is "free speech" but not so good if you're a member of a vulnerable minority just trying to connect with people/communities without having to be super on guard.
I left twitter to get away from an environment like that. I'm not going to head back to a federated version of the same thing
The fact is, hosting online discussion forums gets costly quickly, especially if you want them to be reliable.
Absolutely. I admin several AP instances, including the one I'm posting from now. We have crowd funding to help, but we are still out of pocket running it, but that's fine, because the reason we run it is for the whole community aspect I've been talking about.
I have zero interest in paying out of pocket to run a generic relay that will probably end up being used by the very people I'm trying to avoid.