I see delete as vital for privacy and to prevent major foot guns. I am extremely cautious when posting images for example. Most of the time, I just CTRL+V it and after a few seconds, I see a link to a hosted image in my client.

Did I accidentally upload an image that I didn't want to share? What would I do if I did?

Another fear I have when using nostr is to copy paste the wrong piece of text, for example a password or something similar, and hitring enter accidentally without checking the post again.

These things can happen and the fact that you can't delete a mistake is terrifying. Posting on nostr often feels dangerous to me.

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Then there are the instances where nsecs are posted there should be a massage for an nsec to ask “Are you sure about pasting your NSEC?”

Actually I wouldn't mind if a client showed me every note so I can check it explicitly before I post it with a second interaction.

Also a request for a reach counter to show how many audiences actually saw the tweet

The metric can be an audience web of trust metric and not necessarily a counter like X

Would a time delay mechanism help do you think? A bit like some e-mail have an insensitive button for about 30sec after you hit send.

Perhaps you can optionally set safety rails for yourself in a client. E.g. you choose a “delayed send” time, 5, 10,15,30,60 sec then when you click post it shows in your local feed with a clock icon. Until then you have the option to click the icon and unsend/edit it. After which it pushes the content to relays.

nostr:npub1xtscya34g58tk0z605fvr788k263gsu6cy9x0mhnm87echrgufzsevkk5s what do you think? Viable for Damus?

*proved my point, hit send then saw the auto correct of “unsend it” to “insensitive”

Nostur has this. Still, I'd like to be able to delete for the same reasons nostr:npub12rv5lskctqxxs2c8rf2zlzc7xx3qpvzs3w4etgemauy9thegr43sf485vg states.

You of course can delete but most nostr apps don’t expose the functionality. Some claim it isn’t even possible.

nostr:note1u59uj55lp6cffgfz7u4979sd45v5w9w70y7zpfmzk92w7v3re0vs8l07nd

Deleting isn't really fully possible I think, notes are cached in many relays and clients and it wouldn't be possible to notify all of them to instantly delete it and actually have a 100% delete success. I think the best option we have is to add in client warnings about content you might not want to post like Nsecs or Bitcoin keys, I too have this worry too, I always go over notes many times which contain images or copied test to make sure I don't accidentally post something sensitive. You could add an option to enable a double confirmation or something to post, like it shows a preview of the note and then you have to confirm again, this wouldn't help a lot but might a little.

But like theoretically delete doesn’t guarantee that it’ll work but in reality in practice it works great.

Also centralized services don’t delete at all, they just hide content. So Nostr delete is actually better.

Yeah, the only negative difference is with Nostr is that it's not just one client or relay that has to respond for it to be deleted, it's all of them all together.

How about you try it and then we can talk about whether or not it works.

https://nostr-delete.vercel.app

Can users just select relays that offer deletes and block relays that don't. Or a client that checks all relays have the delete function before posting? Is this possible?

That's fine with me. It already makes it much safer to have the option to hide it from the world at large, even if the service never deleted it.

Very agree ! I’m a quite confident that I won’t post sensitive info by mistake but i have posted typos, hit enter forgetting to upload image etc. Primal had a glitch and posted one image 5times. Now it’s there, spamming my feed forever 😁

Why don’t you just delete those mistakes?

https://nostr-delete.vercel.app

Because the delete button should be at the post. And this only sends request to relays without guarantee that they will honor the request right?

It is at the post in Nos and it uses relays that support delete. You can use ones which don’t but it’s discouraged.

Thank you!

I don't disagree..

nostr:note1c5mclzmgke7lsq9dp6j4lqewrngxafwemykrl8ynnttdjpdq7wxsnhgqzn

This seems like a problem without a solution however. What makes NOSTR powerful is also what makes NOSTR dangerous.

Ugh. Delete works. We have a solution.

https://nostr-delete.vercel.app

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.

NOSTR is a little different than Twitter though. Anybody can make a fake screenshot of a tweet. However, captured NOSTR notes are guaranteed to be authored by the npub associated with them. So people are arguably held even more accountable for their notes on NOSTR than on Twitter.

One of the things I get concerned about is image metadata.

You can argue that you should turn off location tagging on your photos but I find it extremely helpful in my day to day life.

I’m incredibly paranoid that I’ll upload a photo with the location still attached and get my address doxed.

I know most file uploaders don’t actually keep the metadata but I have no way to be sure until it’s too late.

It’s a lot of friction to have to strip the metadata in a separate app before uploading.

Would be cool if nostr clients could indicate if metadata is present and whether to remove it client side or not. I know that puts trust in the clients but for open source clients that can be verified.

Ageee

The hard lesson here is that there is no delete option for online content. If you upload, the data is out there. Or do you think that twitter has no record of your "deleted" tweets?

Similarly on Nostr you could easily delete from your own relay, or have some relays that offer a "delete" option... but other relays will not.

imho it's better to not fool ourselves and learn the lesson that we have to think before we post. Nyms, multiple npubs, other privacy options will have to do..

I remember bringing this up ages ago and it's constantly poopooed. What if you accidentally post something in your camerroll with personal details, you post a photo with your home address visible on a letter, or just accidentally post a photo of a document etc etc. The disappointing answer was to not have anything on your phone with personal details lol.

The other disappointing answer is that everything on the internet is forever and screenshots exist, so nostr is more 'honest' about the situation. You could be in a situation with someone trying to find dirt on you. They may not be all that tech savvy, deleting is 'good enough' to stop that kind of person, with a bit of luck. Why make it so easy??

Nos social seemed to be the only client taking these scenarios seriously. Sadly not available on android.

Just a note regarding the real-world usage of such a function, since this has existed for a long time already on the fediverse, where you also post your content to hundreds (if not thousands) of other servers/instances, and which I've been using over Twitter since 2017:

1. In almost all cases that I have deleted (or even better on Mastodon: "delete and re-draft") a post, it was within less than 10 seconds after posting the mistake. It's highly unlikely that normal people not running a surveillance machine would be able to save it that quickly, since they have to see it first, and then not have it disappear from their timeline immediately.

2. We have to assume that someone *is* running such a surveillance machine, so anything posted publicly has to be assumed to be indexed and searchable *by these actors*

3. Since Mastodon introduced post editing a while ago (i.e. publicly announcing changes to a post), I haven't used "delete and re-draft" at all anymore. This is because deletes were usually about fixing things like typos, grammar, formatting, broken links, etc.. Sometimes it is about changing the content itself, e.g. to remove an unnecessarily aggressive tone for example. But even then, it's virtually always fine if someone would be able to read the previous draft but know that my intention was to change it.

4. I do not remember ever having had to remove something that you describe causing the fear. However, Mastodon does strip image metadata automatically for example, and I think basic safety features like that are very important.

Anyway, just some personal observations, because we don't have to talk about it as if it's some kind of untested no man's land of decentralized social protocols. Hope it's helpful to someone.

Ironically, I just found a typo in this very note, and I'm unable to fix it from my Nostr client. :/

oh yeah i forgot to bring this up, it's very easy to scrape every image uploaded to primal

nostr:note1c5mclzmgke7lsq9dp6j4lqewrngxafwemykrl8ynnttdjpdq7wxsnhgqzn

from great powers comes great responsabilities. Its the same fear you can have when you broadcast a bitcoin transaction.

Posting images that still have Exif geolocation headers is a privacy nightmare. Being able to delete them from relays after the fact would be really helpful even if a few people already received them.

yes, with something like twitter you can be sure public won't see it after you delete it, given that you were quick to delete it after posting (by mistake) and it wasn't that 'breaking news' for someone to screenshot it right away

it would be great to see effort and commitment of relays to respect deletion,

BUT

simplex blog about disappearing messages had a good point: with email you own email, when somebody sends it to you, it would be weird if they could remotely delete it from your computer. same with messages. if you are sovereign, how does someone else's ability to delete stuff from your machine play with it?

nostr:npub1exv22uulqnmlluszc4yk92jhs2e5ajcs6mu3t00a6avzjcalj9csm7d828 solved it by both parties having to decide if there is such thing as 'delete for anyone' in their chat, as somebody might've sold you some digital content and then they delete it?

so this will be an interesting thing

Same. It might be nice if we had a preview post option in clients.

Nostrx.app screenshot of a note preview option? There may be others clients I dunno. Your mileage may vary.👍

This seems like a reasonable compromise

Apple mail has an "undo send" button for a few seconds after clicking send (obviously under the hood it just delays sending the email, but I think it's a great UI)

Nsec1234abc

Oops….

Maybe all posts, text and otherwise, live on your own server but are pointed to by nostr? I’m not a programmer I don’t know what I’m talking about

Makes you more responsible. Check before you post. Be on top of things. Rely on yourself. Personal responsibility. It only makes us stronger.

Amen. Set up your wallet

Just like real life

Nodes will be forced to delete "harmful content"

I use nostr:npub1nxy4qpqnld6kmpphjykvx2lqwvxmuxluddwjamm4nc29ds3elyzsm5avr7 and have deleted things that i regretted posting. Unless someone else saved them before i did that, it doesn't exist anymore.

Deleting notes? Probably use blastr to spread the request to as many relays as possible.

Decentralization requires distributed responsibility. Maybe it should be slightly dangerous. There’s no skin in the game in traditional social media.

“Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world”. Nostr without NIP-09 enforcement doesn’t change this- it just makes your actions a one way trip therefore adding responsibility. The user has a choice how to use it, and it’s a very simple open protocol that allows easy generation of an anon profile if that’s what’s wanted.

Photos accidentally uploaded- yeah that would suck. Password copied and posted? Woops- better hustle to change it. It’s on us.

Appreciate you sir🫡. Now watch me put my foot in my mouth.

Isn't it the same fear than sending your money to the wrong address with Bitcoin and not being able to have it back ?

I'm mean it just learns us to be cautious ?

Or is there a major difference here ?

Yes delete is vital for privacy, which is why a "sometimes working, sometimes not" delete is so much worse than no delete.

Expectation management.

Agree. It needs sorting or Nostr is going nowhere.

5-10 years from now some agencies will be happy that there was no “delete” button.