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.

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.

I agree that people who say "more honest internet" are usually trying to make a virtue of necessity; but its not entirely untrue.

Re-writing one's posts to make replies look off-target / ridiculous was a common enough forum tactic in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Forums would often set posts immutable after a few minutes to limit this.

On balance I think clients and relays should honour deletion requests, but self-doxxing and foot-gunning will remain major risks whatever we do.

"The bad people" can easily store everyone / everything of interest to them and ignore deletion requests.

Well said. I'm not at all a fan of the idea of not being able to delete or edit a comment. The argument of a "more honest internet" is a cope. Yes, both features can be misused but privacy is a human right. While it's true that you can't truly, fully delete things online (and, of course, the technical challenges of throwing a decentralized platform into the mix), that doesn't mean users shouldn't have full control over their online presence as far as the technology permits.

I mean, every one of us has said things online that we would like to forget, and definitely wouldn't want associated with our modern persona. It's not like we're all born with the knowledge of privacy and the permanence of the internet, especially those of us who grew up with the internet. How is it fair that we would all have to potentially pay the price of our past internet idiocy just so we can have a "more honest internet"? It's just a stupid concept. It's like saying, "privacy is dead so let's just give every bit of info to everyone who wants it". That whole argument is a total joke and it doesn't hold up to logic.

See, this is exactly what bugs me about the maxi mentality against privacy coins like Monero. Yes, I love Bitcoin but that doesn't mean I don't take issue with some of its concepts. The immutable, public ledger is a privacy issue; just because it's pseudonymous, that doesn't mean I'm okay with people knowing every transaction I make if they are able to attach a real-world identity to my wallet address(es).

At the end of the day, you cannot have self-sovereignty without privacy.

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.*

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 ?

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.

UK is lost

As of now people are fairly generous and the cost of being on a public relay is probably not very much. But if every event is sent to every relay, scaling problems arise.

I think of this situation as analogous to posting a blog onto a blogging website, or onto my own website. I can follow 100 different blogs on 100 different personal blog websites. Or maybe I can follow them on a few centralized blogging websites like medium, substack, etc. And it works suprisingly well with zero redundancy (just one website). So if it works so damn well with zero redundancy, do we really need to be 25x redundant? Even being just 3x redundant is a huge improvement over a blog on a website. Being 5x redundant is really a hell of a lot safer. I can't imagine a scenario where anyone would need more than 7x redundancy (except highly hated people like Alex Jones and Donald Trump).

Except actually I can imagine such a scenario. If it came to be that popular nostr clients didn't use the outbox model. Then people would have to post to all the popular relays too. But even then, I don't see the benefit of going beyond 7x and just picking some of those to be the popular relays, and instead I start to see it as maybe being disrespectful, taking advantage of the goodwill of open relay hosts because you can... potentially leading to those relays to shut down due to being overloaded.

And many have predicted all relays will eventually charge for service. lest they be taken down for illegal content or be flooded with excessive traffic that the operator cannot afford on their goodwill. It might come to pass.

You really don't need to, if clients implement the outbox model correctly, and unlike Bitcoin, where every node needs to keep a copy of every single transaction in order to maintain censorship resistance, consensus, and full auditability of the supply, that is not the case for Nostr. We ONLY have the censorship resistance piece to worry about, and not every relay can store every user's notes, so being selective about the relays you post to is both wise and courteous.

One of the best things about Nostr is that you can personally host your own content privately, too. This way, even if all 5(or however many you use) of the relays you currently post to decided to ban you, you can simply change your public relays to somewhere else and rebroadcast your notes from your private relay. The reality is, even this is very unlikely to happen unless you really did something deserving of the ban such that all 5 relay operators banned you in quick succession.

As of now people are fairly generous and the cost of being on a public relay is probably not very much. But if every event is sent to every relay, scaling problems arise.

I think of this situation as analogous to posting a blog onto a blogging website, or onto my own website. I can follow 100 different blogs on 100 different personal blog websites. Or maybe I can follow them on a few centralized blogging websites like medium, substack, etc. And it works suprisingly well with zero redundancy (just one website). So if it works so damn well with zero redundancy, do we really need to be 25x redundant? Even being just 3x redundant is a huge improvement over a blog on a website. Being 5x redundant is really a hell of a lot safer. I can't imagine a scenario where anyone would need more than 7x redundancy (except highly hated people like Alex Jones and Donald Trump).

Except actually I can imagine such a scenario. If it came to be that popular nostr clients didn't use the outbox model. Then people would have to post to all the popular relays too. But even then, I don't see the benefit of going beyond 7x and just picking some of those to be the popular relays, and instead I start to see it as maybe being disrespectful, taking advantage of the goodwill of open relay hosts because you can... potentially leading to those relays to shut down due to being overloaded.

And many have predicted all relays will eventually charge for service. lest they be taken down for illegal content or be flooded with excessive traffic that the operator cannot afford on their goodwill. It might come to pass.

Sure it is the decent thing to do to give them a reason, but also invites arguments so I'm of two minds. They will almost inevitably disagree with your reason and get very angry. Relay operators are humans and can't deal with angry people day after day, and being kicked off of a relay in nostr shouldn't be a big deal, you can just trivially go somewhere else. If I was booted from a relay I'd get very excited and happy because "fuck you bitch I'm using nostr, and you can't stop me!" and it would feel great to have such a retort.... It is like sometimes I wish a nuclear war would actually happen so I could feel good that I moved to New Zealand.... if nobody ever tries to censor me, what was the point of nostr? So being explained to isn't really something I think relay ops need to do. Maybe they just want to save on ISP costs (traffic, disk space).

Giving them a chance to download their data is also the decent thing to do, but probably not necessary in practical terms because ... well, because you are using lots of relays aren't you?

I recommend against posting to 17 or 25 relays only because it does not seem like the decent thing to do. I don't plaster all the walls of your home with posters of my missing cat for the same reason, I just put it on a few telephone poles.

Sure it is the decent thing to do to give them a reason, but also invites arguments so I'm of two minds. They will almost inevitably disagree with your reason and get very angry. Relay operators are humans and can't deal with angry people day after day, and being kicked off of a relay in nostr shouldn't be a big deal, you can just trivially go somewhere else. If I was booted from a relay I'd get very excited and happy because "fuck you bitch I'm using nostr, and you can't stop me!" and it would feel great to have such a retort.... It is like sometimes I wish a nuclear war would actually happen so I could feel good that I moved to New Zealand.... if nobody ever tries to censor me, what was the point of nostr? So being explained to isn't really something I think relay ops need to do. Maybe they just want to save on ISP costs (traffic, disk space).

Giving them a chance to download their data is also the decent thing to do, but probably not necessary in practical terms because ... well, because you are using lots of relays aren't you?

I recommend against posting to 17 or 25 relays only because it does not seem like the decent thing to do. I don't plaster all the walls of your home with posters of my missing cat for the same reason, I just put it on a few telephone poles.

1) People can and should post to multiple relays. I've seen people post to 17 or 25 relays (I recommend against that, but there is nothing pushing them to not do it). So if I relay bans them, they don't fucking care, they aren't going to have their post removed from a dozen relays. So in essence, this is very good censorship resistance.

2) Unlike Mastodon, if you get censored from one relay, you have already moved somewhere else because you are posting on multiple relays. You just drop that one and perhaps replace it with a new one. In the mastodon case, you lose your account and all your followers. In the nostr case you only lose an unimportant relationship with a relay you no longer like, and your followers don't even notice.

3) If clients are just using a few big centralized servers, then those client authors misunderstand the whole point of nostr. Choose a better client.

4) If "nobody is listening" to the relay that you advertise as the one you now post at (when you move), then that is only because their clients are not doing nostr in a decentralized way (the outbox model). You are right to notice something is wrong with their model, but it is not something wrong with nostr itself.

There is a tension between being being distributed + censorship resistant, and maintaining client privacy. Some people want to provide better client privacy by not connecting to "strange relays" at the expense of censorship resistance. That choice isn't right or wrong, but it isn't the choice I would make. My stance is that privacy should be done right - via a VPN or Tor - and that nostr decentralization and censorship resistance can be maximized without sacrficing privacy when privacy is done right.

And finally, yes relays will censor. If you put illegal content on my relay, why should I risk my neck for the illegal content of someone I don't even know? It is your job to find a relay that allows it. This feeling of entitlement, that relay operators must host your content, that you are entitled to their hosting, should really be re-examined. We need to maintain liberty and freedom including the liberty of relay operators to host what they choose (and only what they choose), and yet still we can provide very sigificant censorship resistance by breaking the connection between central providers (twitter, mastodon servers) and your personally managed identity.

I hope you understand that this is the best we can do.

1 sat for every message is expensive enough to suppress legitimate users who are just financially poor. Needs to be about an order of magnitude cheaper imo. A spam filter cheap enough to let all legitimate users through might also let the most dedicated spammers get some stuff through too, but that's the right balance

I 100% believe this is the way.

We’re on the journey right now to find a scaleable layer 2 solution, and we’ll surely get there, probably this cycle!

Some ANONs need absolute privacy, at scale, today… so Monero.

After BTC layer 2 is perfected tho…

Monero will lose considerably more market share to BTC, as will all others.

The point is that children DONT go hungry in capitalist systems...