The protected tag is a relatively new feature that clients may have slowly been adding. I think it was originally thought up for the sake of lockbox and zapbox relays, so that there could be kind 1 and other standard note types that could be published to a specific relay that only a select group could read from. This would be more private than publishing to public relays that anyone can read from, but less private than encrypting the content.
Discussion
I can see a use case for this, but I'm not a fan of implicitly protecting the event when sending to one relay specifically, I'd much prefer an EXPLICIT parameter to pass from client.
But that explains exactly why I had this behaviour!
100% agree. Users should have some indication that the event will be protected, and ideally a way to select whether or not they want the event to be protected when they write to a single relay.
There's an indicator if you are trying to post inside a relay feed (not your home feed), but I will allow you to disable it, this indeed needs to be more flexible, the reason I did was because some people wanted.
Oh awesome! I've not even seen that myself yet. So I'm pretty sure it's a humble + haven thing then!
I think that'd be great to notify the user as you're doing, and allow them to disable it.