Ugh. Delete works. We have a solution.
Discussion
Only if you trust that all clients will honor that.
It’s about trusting relays not clients. But relays identify themselves as supporting delete or not.
It’s more than just trusting relays. It’s trusting all the clients that received the note through the relays too, before you decided to delete your note.
You can’t delete something from the internet.*
Yes, but its still better than no option. Less censorship is better than more censorship. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good and all that.
I agree that the feature should exist, and will probably work a lot of the time. But you still need to be careful what you post. It wouldn’t even be difficult for someone to make a bot that specifically collects all the notes that people “delete”, and keeps them online. www dot deleted nostr notes dot com, or something.
There used to be one of these for twitter, tracking politicians deleted tweets. It got blocked with the API removal.
https://www.propublica.org/article/politwoops-deleted-tweets-twitter-politicians-musk
I actually think that is a shame. People of public influence need to have more scrutiny and less privacy. The inverse is also true. A delete feature but also the ability to collate deletes from influential individuals is a good balance. We can't stop people screen capturing and we should never want to. . If there was a choice though, I think it should not be trivial to access deleted posts on mass. There needs to be work put into it, so we know there is genuine interest. Nobody cares about recovering deleted posts from people with little reach or influence. But the poster does.