Even if we ignore the bad psychological and societal effects of such practices and assume they are good, and even if we assume that Nostr is all running in a single server that has all the events (a Bluesky-like unavoidable requirement for such universal consistency) these people are still completely oblivious to the fact that anyone can create a bazillion keypairs and spam like counts.
So when they ask for a "universal consistent like count" what these people are really asking for is for a centralized KYC barrier at the doors of Nostr that ensures only a single keypair can be created by each human.
Outbox model is not being challenged, I still think outbox model should be the de facto standard, but it can be complemented. I don't think anyone should implement a thing that just does the inbox model, that would be very limiting -- i.e. you would never be able to follow anyone who doesn't do the publish-to-inbox flow on their side.
But I guess you could have a third-party service automatically forwarding stuff from outboxes to inboxes. Is there a risk to doing this?
They must still have an outbox relay unless they really want to not get their message out in the world for all to see -- which is the default behavior for people who use Twitter and so on.
I heard that there is an ongoing movement now for people that truly care about decentralization and censorship-resistance to only publish to small relays.
I didn't mean to downplay the challenges, and I don't even think outbox/gossip model is the only solution or the best (although I can't think of anything better at this point). All I did was to complain about the current state of things and wish they were better.
I asked the Owncast guy about a possible integration with Nostr. This was his answer: "I know very little about nostr on a technical level. But on a personal level, every person I've ever met who is involved with nostr has been obnoxious, to put it nicely. Owncast is all in on the Fediverse, but even if it wasn't, I've been pretty turned off from giving nostr the time of day just because I don't want to be around nostr people."
Without a phone number you can't get an email from one of the big providers, without an email from one of the big providers you can't have a Twitter account or an account anywhere basically. Even the "no KYC" services pretty much rely on this unifying KYC layer that is provided by crazy telecom companies.