Something like Nostr was going to be made one way or another. I know, because I thought of something similar around the same time (the dates are fuzzy to me, and don't matter anyways).

So, if two people had independently thought of two similar protocols, there's probably dozens of other people out there who were thinking along the same lines. But it was Fiatjaf who beat everyone to the punch.

For those interested, I was trying to make a replacement for email using relays (like Nostr), thick clients (like Nostr), and end-to-end encryption. I stopped working on my protocol once I realized that Nostr was more flexible than what I was building.