No, they are not. There is no federation between relays dictated by the protocol, if that's what you mean. Relays are just servers maintaining a database. Just like SN. The only major difference might be that they use websockets instead of HTTP for communication.[1]
What makes nostr decentralized is that there are many relays and clients can choose to which relays they want to connect.
However, I trust that the SN ranking engine/algorithm (whatever you want to call it) could be run on over a SN relay somehow, notes got zaps too
No, they are not. There is no federation between relays dictated by the protocol, if that's what you mean. Relays are just servers maintaining a database. Just like SN. The only major difference might be that they use websockets instead of HTTP for communication.[1]
What makes nostr decentralized is that there are many relays and clients can choose to which relays they want to connect.
I tried to explain in the post you quoted and here in more detail how I don't think that's as simple as you might think
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/what-is-web-socket-and-how-it-is-different-from-the-http/ ↩