2279 sats \ 4 replies \ @thrown 23 Jan 2023 \ on: Will Nostr put people back in control of their data? nostr
Identity? Sure.
Data? No (or at least not yet).
When you post on Nostr, you neither get a guarantee of permanence, nor a guarantee of impermanence. The author has absolutely zero control over what happens to their content after they hand it over to a relay.
I believe that it would be better to post a reference link to a relay. That way you could delete the content and the link hosted on the relay would lead to nothing.
But because a system like that is a “soft delete” and not a “hard delete”, Nostr implementors are of the belief that it is better to not bother. Instead they would prefer to explain to users that they don’t have control at all.
For this reason, I am of the mind that the best use cases are ones that involve content / data that is simultaneously trivial and valuable. For example, product reviews. People don’t post PII in product reviews, but it is still data that is very valuable.
Good point! Agree that the creator does not have control over their data. The title is wrong.
Once you broadcast to the internet, you don't have control over ever deleting it. Nostr can't do anything about it.
But you are not locked into single platform provider as strongly. If you publish onto medium, or send an iMessage, and the platform bans you, you can't easily take your content with you. I guess you could be backing up everything, but its really hard.
I believe with Nostr, it will be easy to have a relay that will back up all your content, including responses to it, and you can replay any of it anytime in the future. No single client or relay can stop you.
Thanks for the comment. You actually made me improve my original thinking. Take my sats!
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Once you broadcast to the internet, you don't have control over ever deleting it
I think this way of thinking is just too simplistic. The vast majority of people do not have enemies that are specifically logging everything they say/do permanently in an effort to “get” them in the future.
Most people just don’t have that threat level. Which is why many of us would like to have soft deletes at least as an option.
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Yep, that makes sense. I like to have soft delete functionality as well, its useful. But you can't verify it yourself.
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You can verify a soft delete if you are only sharing pointers to your data on the relay. Then you would only need to verify that you yourself deleted the data.
But again, that’s not how Nostr is designed. And that’s one of the issues I have with it.
But I still think there would be ways of a relay verifying a delete for you. At least you could try to access the note and it would be gone. That would be the naive way
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