Permanence has weight.

On Twitter, you could delete. On Instagram, stories disappeared. But every note you sign on Nostr is forever. Not “cloud storage forever.” Cryptographically signed, distributed across relays, permanently archived forever.

This isn’t social media. It’s testimony.

Future anthropologists won’t just find our monuments. They’ll find our Tuesdays. Our arguments about nothing. Our moments of brilliance and stupidity, all time-stamped and searchable. Your great grandchildren won’t wonder who you were. They’ll know exactly.

And here’s what breaks my brain: I can’t decide if this makes me want to post more carefully or more honestly. If permanence demands performance or authenticity. If being remembered forever means I should be more thoughtful or just more real.

Maybe the weight of permanence isn’t about posting better takes. Maybe it’s about living a life you’d want preserved.

The protocol doesn’t judge. But everyone who comes after will.

Are you posting like an ancestor or like the timeline will forget?

Because it won’t.

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Discussion

Thanks for that. Are the media we post here also archived forever?

Signed and sealed

Depends. Media links could become dead if the file is deleted from the hosting server. A link to Giphy might break or even point to a different image without you knowing. But a link which includes the hash of the image, like nostr.build or blossom based servers, encodes the actual image hash, so even though the link doesn’t change, a client can potentially look on different servers in the case of a dead link because it can prove the image correct because of the hash.

That’s not relevant. It’s still censored.

Will I be shadow banned by every single relay though?

That’s like saying if you shutdown one node runner, we’re doomed. That’s not how it works.

Reframe it as much as you want. It’s still a shadowban. Welcome to old twitter.

Unlike Twitter, you can run your own relay and have it to not shadow ban you.

Just the matter of who is connecting to your relay.

Haha so shadowbanning with different words 😂😂