It's a decent guess!

Earlier this year I started experimenting with building something like SN on nostr, Outer Space. After awhile it became clear that many of the things I wanted to do on nostr would need to be provided in a centralized way (at least that was the opinion of the nostr devs when we spoke), e.g. our weird algo experiments, our weird economic experiments, etc ... and building a centralized nostr experience arguably defeats some of the purpose of us building on it natively.

So we decided that if we're going to run centralized experiments, we might as well do them here and then support as much interop with nostr as we can. For the time being, we're hoping nostr can be a kind of cofunction social universe that we can build portals to and from wherever our visions overlap.

My goal from the beginning of SN was for it to eventually be a protocol. I suspect that'll happen one way or another. It's just not super clear what SN even is yet so it's hard to evaluate what warrants being built into a protocol or not.