Anyone have a nice an easy explanation of whatever this is? Sounds like ActivityPub, but it’s also used as an extra layer on top of Bitcoin’s Lightning Network? Someone in the comments also mentions onion routing?

It's not like ActivityPub, and it doesn't use lightning as part of the transport on the network.

It's basically a public key addressed messaging protocol that uses relays to complete transport.

https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr