Oddbean new post about | logout
 Nah, by far one of the most high-signal npubs on here. 
 Agree. One of my favorite accounts on Nostr. Keep the posts coming. 
 good to keep abreast of who is a dupe 
 If a Note is on 1 node that deletes it, and another node still has it, will it somehow populate back to the node that deleted it if enough users are searching for it?

i guess what i'm asking is are the Nodes interconnected. if this is like a Hub and Spoke network, then sometimes you have to fly from one hub to another hub to get to small towns or small relay villages. 
 the specification is very vague about this but part of the reason is there is no consensus

you basically have to assume two things:

1. anything you publish is probably picked up immediately and stored by somebody
2. any delete or replace event is probably not going to be acted upon by somebody

this is why fiatjaf and the general consensus among everyone who understands the protocol is that delete just doesn't work

i'm one of the small number who points out that the very concept of replacement should involve a reference to chain them and that deleting should not be all or nothing but moving old versions to a state where they can be deleted but usually not immediately

most of the nostr devs do not really understand distributed systems theory adequately, and i'm not a competent expert but they mostly understand less than me (i've been working on distributed systems since 2018 pretty much full time)

anyhow, i hope that helps 
 oh yes and i probably should add this

the delete event, iirc, is an ephemeral event

it should be a tombstone event, and it should not disappear until quite a bit longer later

this is standard protocol in distributed databases, until all traces of the deleted item are gone from replicas the delete event should persist

nostr:nevent1qvzqqqqqqypzqnyqqft6tz9g9pyaqjvp0s4a4tvcfvj6gkke7mddvmj86w68uwe0qyghwumn8ghj7mn0wd68ytnvv9hxgtcpz9mhxue69uhkummnw3ezuamfdejj7qpqz0s7s35sj47cgwckpsakk6uw9r68vkaukz096pp5z0evyqjp2ynsf0zedq 
 i am thinking along the lines of "censorship resistant" so i was imagining self-healing network.   

so i was mainly worrying about the opposite which would be, you plug in your relay with wisdom, and it gets immediately truncated because the network has issued delete requests for those notes.

perhaps some people will make lists of "Do-not-delete notes" for wisdom . so these can always be persist if there is demand from the users and will from relays. 
 i don't think you really understood what i just said

deleting requires you to at least leave the tombstone around for long enough that all replicas implement the intent of the publisher

but that is completely and utterly naive because someone probably has a value in keeping all of the data and nobody can force them to delete it

if your system depends on virtue to function it's fucked

at minimum you can count on the spook agencies throwing their infinity funding pool from all the coke smuggling into paying for infinity storage to keep everything

i'm not "worried" about anything it's simply going to happen, and if you want to live in the real world and not be shocked by how things actually work, try to think through the scenario that we are discussing in full detail and realise that hoping everyone is deleting something that is already out there is foolish

they aren't, and they won't

and for the sake of actual protocol, the delete event needs to continue to exist as long as possible

from a data storage and especially now SSD operational principles perspective, deleting events is also... EXPENSIVE because every time you rewrite a block it gets one write closer to death 
 rereading everything, and i think I understand better. making a personal note to reread your notes 'cause there's  lot of info density per sentence. thank you for explaining 
 i do kinda enjoy explaining things, there is a bit of the teacher in me, but it also infuriates me how often i have to repeat myself, and nobody's gonna pay me to do this so i should probably stop doing it so much