Nostr Web Client

In short, yes, they can. Just like with Nostr notes (where anyone can broadcast or republish your events to other relays, spreading your content virally through the network), in Blossom anyone can mirror your media to other Blossom servers simply by calling the /mirror endpoint. I don’t want to put words in nostr:nprofile1qyghwumn8ghj7mn0wd68yat99e3k7mgpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduq3qamnwvaz7tmwdaehgu3wwa5kuegpr9mhxue69uhhq7tjv9kkjepwve5kzar2v9nzucm0d5qzqfngzhsvjggdlgeycm96x4emzjlwf8dyyzdfg4hefp89zpkdgz99ngvl73’s mouth, but IMO this is by design. Blossom was meant as a simple, permissionless, resilience and censorship-resistance first protocol. Basically, it's pragmatical IPFS without the P2P/DHT aspect and its complications. It’s meant to spread your stuff around.

And then, as usual, Nostriches decided to use Blossom as the everything-media protocol without users fully understanding it. So now folks are uploading selfies, vlogs, and whatnot, and some are complaining that their stuff is being mirrored without permission. Or worse, they are uploading their stuff without knowing that Blossom is and that the whole point is that it's meant to facilitate mirroring of stuff across servers.

So my ask above is whether we should have some way to mark media as “protected,” meaning that the original author’s intention is for the content not to be spread to other Blossom servers. As with everything on the internet, this would be easy to bypass, but it would at least act as a declaration of intent from the author. Compliant Blossom tech could then respect this, so that other Nostriches don’t unintentionally mirror a protected blob against the author’s wishes.

Good read on the whats and whys of Blossom:

nostr:nevent1qqs0nk034mpdjf9efxjshtpdns8guk9lvrzakvvuz95rp3x8mc7gwagzyrtp7w79k045gq80mtnpdxjuzl9t7vjxk52rv80f888y5xsd5mh55cap4rd

Hakan 4mo ago

Thank you very much for your detailed and clear answer as always.

I agree with what you said. Even leaving Blossom aside, anything put on the internet can be easily copied. In this respect, no such media host will offer complete privacy. But it's good that people have even minimal control over their own media.

For example, I was thinking "I may not be able to completely delete my notes, but at least I can delete the image I uploaded to different hosts if I regret it later and somehow disconnect it from my profile". If there was a feature like you said, I could upload some images like that. For most images, it's important to know that they won't be deleted later.

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Discussion

Hakan 4mo ago

Or it can be a site, an application that will send a deletion request to all known blossom hosts as in the notes.

Anthony Accioly 4mo ago

Agreed. Client side support for deletion is still rare, nak can delete blobs. I assume some blossom management apps can do this as well.