Looking quickly at it I think you need to put in an exception for the well-known file location. This answer should help: 

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12865780/mod-rewrite-exception-for-a-specific-file

If you see this in time you might edit it to put four spaces before each line of code or put the whole code block between three backticks (`). It'll then look like this in preview.

```
this is code
```

Thanks for the bounty award, have a nice day!

Thanks for the reply. I think this is what you mean? This is in the original .htaccess file on my server. I did not write these--I am just using the Wordpress template I got with the hosting provider along with Woocommerce. 

# BEGIN WordPress
# The directives (lines) between "BEGIN WordPress" and "END WordPress" are
# dynamically generated, and should only be modified via WordPress filters.
# Any changes to the directives between these markers will be overwritten.
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization}]
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>


dash

Does your wordpress site have pretty urls? The redirects that's using may be catching the request to .well-known/nostr.json. Tried it with one of my wordpress sites and I get a 404 as well (because the file doesn't exist) but it returns much faster than yours does. Perhaps you can share any mod rewrite rules you have in place.