What happens if someone deletes their account on here? Do all notes live on forever? Do other users know the account has been deleted? I have zero knowledge of how any of this works.
Discussion
#[2] maybe you know?
You cannot simply just delete anything. Once you publish anything to a relay, such as a note or account, it's there to stay.
You can *request* that a note or account be removed from relays, and some will accept the removal request. However, most won't. And even though some relays will remove the data, it will still remain on the relays that didn't.
And even the relays that will remove the data, I'm pretty sure that they will just eventually download the information again if it gets observed by a relay that still has the data.
Just be careful what relays you connect to, and/or what you are publishing.
Furthermore, just to stay on the safe side (because you can't really delete anything), I personally avoid making posts about hot takes, politics or religion.
Is it generally best practice to connect to fewer, rather than many relays?
It depends on what the relays are, what you want your outreach to be, and how much data you are willing to consume on your internet. For instance, if you buy access to nostr.wine, it is a relay that aggregates a lot of popular relays, so getting nostr.wine alone will cut your necessary relay list in half.
To a certain extent, many users including myself, would say that the number alone is inconsequential. There was a point where I was connected to 20 relays at once, which is common.
It depends on how they delete it. There's no real delete on nostr. You can send a new request and ask to be forgotten by the ecosystem but it's just a request.
The old data lives on as long as it's on some relays and clients but if relays respect the wish and delete the events from their databases then the notes can be gone.
Kind of like emails. Once you send them out you're not in control of them anymore but can ask nicely to delete the copies.
The email analogy was helpful. So what I’ve got here is an email account that’s publicly viewable more or less in perpetuity. No criticism, but just interesting to think through the trade-offs. Makes you stop and consider what you’re posting on here. I think that could be a potential benefit to help the troll demon scourge on traditional social media.
I think that, if you delete your account, it's just an app cleanup from your storage mobile, because, the nSec and nPub continue existing on Nostr protocol, your nSec have signed a lot of events on relays that you posted, if the admins of the relays that you posted your events don't delete him database, your nSec, your profile, your posts and events, continue existing for all.