What happens to really old notes? Do relays delete them after a while? It’d be cool if there was also a consensual way to delete notes, if the user could mark one for deletion or set an expiration date, at which point the relays could delete them and free up space.
Discussion
the nips support user requests for delete and expiration tags, but no guarantee that they'll be removed.
there's no guarantee any relay outside your control will store notes either, so unless their's an enforceable contractual obligation, if you really need those notes, you should also write to your own relay.
There a clients that add expiration dates to events. I want to offer that for ours, as well, as it's cleaner than deletion, since relays don't have to store the deletion-request events forever.
Not just useful for normal notes; also stuff like reactions or zap events, could eventually expire.
Sort of ties into what Will was saying about abstracting out stats, so that you can delete the corresponding events without loss of information.
I guess I'm sort of used to that from bookkeeping, where you set an archival-expiration for different categories of documents or records, and the server checks every day for what has expired and deletes it.
Passive deletion, where stuff just rolls off.
I believe you can request that relays delete your note but there's no guaratee they'll honor it: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/09.md
In general it's the relay operator's discretion.
Best to run a private relay and back up your old notes as relays aren’t guaranteed to store them. There are great solutions on start9 or umbrel. Relays have in fact nuked everything in the past. One recent example was the Damus relay last year aka “the nukening”.
And NIP-09 covers event deletion
Nostr sucks at saving notes long term and nostr apps don't warn users. It's one of those ways nostr is currently designed to keep the internet money-controlled and dysfunctional.
If the notes are still around on some relay out there, you might still be able to find them with https://nostrsync.vercel.app/ and download your own backup file
(mostly copied and pasted this reply)
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Each relay is run by a person that sets their only event retention policy (implicitly or explicitly).
Nostr is supposed to be permissionless & decentralised.
The only way to control this is to run your own relay.