Oddbean new post about login | logout 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