The idea that you "can't delete stuff on Nostr" is a misdirection about what Nostr actually is. Nostr relays are just independent web servers. You absolutely can reach out to a relay operator and ask them to delete your stuff from their relay, as you can with any other website. In some jurisdictions they are legally obligated to do this. Kind 5 deletion events just automate this process. When people say "you can't delete stuff on Nostr" they mean you can't easily automate the process because of the same problem Outbox Model aims to solve, and/or that there are jurisdictions where relay operators don't have to care or choose to ignore you anyway. However this is not actually different or special from anywhere else on the internet, except that maybe on Nostr your content can travel to more places faster to begin with. It's not really an excuse not to try. When you delete stuff on the Fediverse, it gets removed from 99% of places automatically because the developers have decided to try instead of resigning themselves because "it's too hard" or will "never be perfect anyway".
Discussion
What happen when the relay server close down? Meaning all our post be gone too, right?
If we run a relay server, would the storage need to gets bigger with time?
You broadcast to multiple relays so there are multiple copies of your notes. You can also run a personal relay of even run one time backups.
Data can and probably will be deleted from relays often unless it’s a feature they advertise as not deleting your data.
Yes they are web servers, but most content on the web is on a single server, with rebroadcasting your note ends up on hundreds of servers, maybe as we grow this becomes 1000s of servers.
Relying on asking nicely or state laws is just not gonna work, nostr is built to resist this. That's why torrents don't go down - which we are closer to than a traditional webserver.
Happy to be proven wrong, I would love to delete some notes. Even now our "deletes" are more like "a request to no longer serve" without actually removing the content from the server.
Agreed on it just being the Web. However, it's still a bit different with signed content, because it is attributable to that pubkey for eternity, whereas unsigned content offers plausible deniability.
This 👆 nostr:npub1q3sle0kvfsehgsuexttt3ugjd8xdklxfwwkh559wxckmzddywnws6cd26p I believe this feeling comes mostly from the aspect of nostr being "pgp-gone-social" with every note created having a digital stamp of authenticity valid forever, so even if relays are not storing the note itself, a single screenshot someone takes is enough to prove years later a note existed and is valid since the signature cannot be forged.
Plus there are the incentives aspect at play as well since with nostr your incentive is to use the same nsec/npub pair forever as changing identities risk you not being discovered anymore, so you carry the weight of all notes you ever broadcast, while something like the fediverse your incentive is to have identities in different servers to make connections, and avoid defederation, which opens up for the plausible deniability here
Think you’re missing the end-user experience point of view.
There are relays that put everything on the BCH chain. No way to delete anything that this relay collected.
Sure, as long as you only use friendly relays in favorable jurisdictions and nobody ever archives or reposts them. Yes, then you can rely on government censorship to compel well known relays to remove your own data. If your signed messages are still available elsewhere... is that really deleting them?
Information is surface of a sphere .. every bit we post on internet will eventually get deleted - automatically.. except for #bitcoin .
Most my stories I posted to geocities are already deleted .. blogger too ..
delete this