The point of a delete isn’t exactly to make sure that we can algorithmically prove the content is gone forever for everyone. The point is to actually indicate the person who created it now wants it retracted. Requesting delete is a social signal to say that the creator no longer wants to endorse authorship of this content and retracts it. Most of the time we should honor that social request by removing the content from our servers, databases, and clients. That way new people won’t find the content and thing the author stands by it. Maybe you’re deleting a typo, or a drunken post, or some revenge porn, but being able to say, oops take that down, is important. 

The confusion comes when nerds get pedantic and argue that you can’t actually delete anything or be absolutely sure it’s gone. It’s true, but that’s also true of a conversation you have in person, the people there remember what you said. But you can apologize after and say “it is forgotten.” Which doesn’t mean it’s actually forgotten or deleted from people’s memories. More, there is an agreement that it’s been retracted. Someone could have recorded that inappropriate conversation and refuse to honor the retraction, but being able to signal that it’s “deleted” is very important. 

What’s more, most clients and relays should honor a user’s request over their own content. If we believe in individual autonomy and self sovereignty then we should respect when users want to retract something they’ve published. 

There are edge cases where we have content reports and reposts which include the original content. I think the solution is to simply include a reference to the content rather than embedding it. There are also cases clients retain a cache of the content, and would then need to honor the delete request. In some cases that might be hard but it was easy to implement in nos and I suspect it’s easy if you’re not using an immutable db. 

Perhaps folks who are concerned about the completeness of “delete” should update their UI to say “retract” or something similar. But then in your FAQ explain that retraction request’s are a kind of delete but because it’s a distributed system there is no way to ensure it is deleted everywhere.