Oddbean

A mastodon instance can delete my years of microblog because I don't own them in that sense. The person who own the instance own his and my speech. I can own my backup files of what I post. Client side reliable not-compromisable full storage (with some technical limits or hard cap) is what I would achieve on nostr.

splitting responsibility is also adding attack surface to my storage; relays are intended to be changed, to fail, be censored and censor. In this cases you can switch relays. They need to be treath in an adversarial way in a lot of ways. So I think at the total opposito of your statement 😅💜

A self hosting relay is useful for being indipendent at sharing your content with others, it is superflous, in my opinion, at storing/backupping them as all notes originates, transitates and are stored in the clients. Keep it simple :)

but thats the way you backup everything pre-nostr. All internet services are designed to store data in the server as a reliable source. With nostr I see a natural shift to client first-class database storage. Then, a second backup could be selfhosted with relays to have data redoundancy and for all threat model/preferencies.

you are mistaken, Nostr isn't better than Mastodon because it offers unique storage solution. You can backup your Mastodon posts just as well, the difference is Mastodon server owns your identifier, so even if you upload all your posts to your own Mastodon server, you lose your identity (and thus followers). Nostr commits posts to your public key, and demands that your followers look for you using that key. of course, it doesn't answer how should your followers find you except by a coincidence of publishing and reading from the same relays. Pkarr.org offers an answer to that question, but it is not compatible with Nostr keys unfortunately

I agree, the revolution with nostr is "own your identity". But this don't exclude what I'm saying: on nostr the natural first database become the client. Imagine this: you are writing a post on mastodon. You send it but no connection; for a connection error the post is frozen in your client. This is mean that this post "never existed"; the post never reached the server where the ultimate database resides. Now see the exact situation composing a nostr note. One/some relays doesnt received the notes? It still exists in the ultimate database that is your client. A relay not having some notes is intended to be possible; could be also an intentional choice to not send a particular note to some particular relays. There could be exceptions (running out of storage on device...) but the shift I see is natural: with nostr clients are the new ultimate uncontested databases of information and this could enable a lot of cool feature. Relays could be backups of this data, multimedia-server-storage (all that isnt "notes", see blossom for example...); but assignin them responsibility on notes-data-retention is a big step in a wrong derection in my opinion. :)