https://github.com/BlowaterNostr/blowater/pull/160

After almost half a year of experiment in production, we decided to sunset the "Chunked Image Events" feature in Blowater. This feature allowed users to send large images over relays in DM in an encrypted manner.

This feature predated NIP-95 and was probably the first in the community to experimentw with relay stored encrypted content.

We sunset it for 2 reasons:

1. It broke the atomicity of events. An image or a file should be an atom. Breaking them into many events broke this pattern and make the implementation difficult to maintain. An event should represent a whole thing, instead of a chunk of a whole thing.

2. Performance is not good. But performance is actually not as bad. The real problem is that sometimes relays lost events so that some chunks of an old image might be lost and thus the client will never be able to recover the image.

But, encrypted binary content in DM is not going away!

We will implement a standalone binary storage service for DM, similar to nostr.build. Just like Blowater itself, we will first experiment with it close sourced. Once we feel it's good enough, we will open source it.

My vision is to implement several side-network that deal with specialized tasks that can interop with relays either directly or through clients.

This binary storage service might also just be decentralized as well, but it's not another IPFS. We have different and more realistic goals on Nostr.

Stay tuned.