Forgive my UTTER technical ignorance here but shouldn't all people run their own node/relay to secure historical reference and anything passing through other public relays expire automatically in a timeframe controlled by the message sender?
Sometimes we write something we destine for eternity and other (most) times we want our words to echo briefly in a room then drift away with the wind to be lost forever.
Most relays don't respect expiration tags, and hardly any clients add them. Many relays ignore deletes or are sloppy about them, and the public relays are usually completely obsessed with archiving every 👍🏻❤️🤪⚡ anyone ever posted ever.
Most normal users assume more "monumental" events like longform articles or publications/books will be maintained, at least in the medium-term, so they put The Important Stuff in them. They don't usually realize that ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING is being logged, catalogued, and archived, so that it can get dug back up in 10 years, to get thrown in their face.
As soon as they realize this, and notice that no client has a delete button, they head for the exit. Universal event persistence is a protocol bug, not a feature.
100% agree with you on this. There is stuff worth archiving and then there is the 'sandpit' of everyday life where we want to experiment with life without non contextual 'blowback' in a decades time.
Is anyone working on this? It's a really distinction that you raise here.
Our team at #Gitcitadel has been working on it. We just implemented our first expiring events and it feels good. 😂 Been wanting that so bad, for so long, fr.
I know that certain client designs (Amethyst, Jumble, Chachi, etc.) are increasingly focused on helping people take more control of their data, and some of the relay devs and admins are also passionate about this issue.
It's not hopeless, but it goes against the main propaganda and the core concept for the biggest clients.
Waiting for the day.
To be fair, the internet doesn’t have a delete button. There’s no solution for that.
Failure to acknowledge that leads to an endless cat-and-mouse game and feelings hurt.
The problem is that with the exception of cases where you only post your notes on private relays, where there isn't much reach by definition, there's no way to guarantee the note won't be broadcast somewhere else and stored till time immemorial
And to be clear, I'm all for that, I'm building private communities for a reason, but the average nostr user that only uses kind 1 clients may not want that
We literally have a 98% defection rate. The average of the remainder is 1% of kind 1 client users.
They are happy with the status quo. Yes.
Most people are not influencers and don't expect to have wide reach. And everyone knows that no deletion is guaranteed (any app can be screen-shotted or have entries exported over an API, that's not a unique concern of Nostr).
They want to talk to a larger or smaller subset of users, have lively discussions, occasionally meet new people, be assured that participants can all see their notes, and have the ability to delete or expire their notes.
We know this, for a fact, even with the most-rabidly enthusiastic of the current userbase, as we are almost all also using non-Nostr communication channels, like Discord, Telegram, SimpleX, Slack, etc. so that we can have that user experience.
I agree! And that's why I'm building community tools, I was just talking about kind 1 clients
If they believe that X and other services actually delete their data, nothing can save them.
Nobody believes that. Did you even read what I wrote?
Anything that you write for public view is persistent. It doesn't matter what protocol or service you use, and it definitely doesn't matter how many times you press the delete key. Once it's out, it's out, so think twice about how you identify (dox) yourself in every situation.
