"I've seen so many people say they won't use Nostr because we don't support delete. This is really frustrating, because Nostr DOES support delete, it's right there in the NIP's!"

— rabble

A few days back, rabble posted a note and a blog post discussing the misconceptions about Nostr's inability to delete notes and his perception on how the issue should be approached.

You can read the blog post here.

His thoughts prompted me to share my own thoughts on deleting stuff on the Internet in general and Nostr in particular. My note got some attention (lots by my meager standards 😆), reposts and comments so I thought it would be good to expand a bit more in this week's newsletter. Make sure to check out my original note below and the responses. There were very good points made to support also the need to delete notes.

The good old Internet

Before MySpace, Twitter, Facebook and the rest of the social media behemoths came around, the Internet was made of a bunch of decentralized services like IRC servers. You would connect to a server, chat with people, exchange files and know that once you post something, it's out there and completely out of your control.

The Internet is just amplifying the reach of your speech. You can't delete what is posted just like you can't unspeak what you have spoken.

Posting something on the Internet is like peeing in the swimming pool. Once it's out, you can't take it back.

— Old piece of wisdom passed over to me in the early years of the Internet

I took this advice to heart. And I drill it into my kids every day: don't share with anyone anything that you wouldn't want splashed on all the high school screens.

My approach to deleting Tweets, notes, and other stuff

I don't understand the fear of not being able to delete notes.

Yes, now there is a permanent record of what you say and everyone can see it. It is the price, and the beauty, of having the Internet megaphone.

So use it wisely. Think twice before you post.

The inability to delete has the potential to make the Internet a better place. To get rid of all the bullshit that goes around elsewhere in centralized apps.

Sure it would had been nice to be able to edit tweets to correct misspellings but I believe that an Internet where you can't delete stuff is a better Internet.

I remember one time when I felt for a prank from an Ethereum Twitter user. He, and his followers, roasted me for days, reposting my tweet and having a blast at my expense. I was tempted to delete my tweet but I felt that that would had been an act of cowardice. Better to own my mistake and use all the scorn directed at me to learn the lesson.

But what if I change my mind?

But what if I change my mind and I don't agree any more with something I posted 5 years ago?

Congratulations! You have grown! You have learned new things and now you have new perspectives on life and stuff.

I pity those who agree with everything they have written on the Internet in the last 20 years.

Change is natural. Change is good. Your past posts are proof of your growth. Why would you want to delete them?

If sharing the fact that you have changed your mind scares you, if you'd rather delete an old post that admit that you were wrong, maybe you should take a deeper look within yourself.

And let me be clear, people who go back through your posts to find something damning that you said 5 or 10 years ago are at the very least stupid and most likely evil, driven by an ill will towards you. They are the problem, not your thoughts from 10 years ago.

Deleting in Nostr

Like rabble says, you can mark a note as deleted. Some clients and relays may honor the request, some may not. You never know. Rabble's take is that by marking something for deletion you're signaling that you have grown, that you have changed your mind and that that note does not accurately capture your thoughts on the subject any longer.

I respectfully disagree. I think that posting a new note with your new thoughts is a better approach. You can even quote the old note to make sure that everyone knows what you're talking about. Because, for all purposes, you don't know if the note will ever be deleted anyway.

For me, the existence of the old note in conjunction with the new note signifies growth and that is what matters the most.

Full disclosure: when I decided to stop tweeting and focus on Nostr, I left the Twitter account inactive with the content still up. But after Twitter started requesting biometrics I realized that it was time to close the account and that had the effect of deleting everything: good (the few) and bad (the many) tweets alike.

Notable notes

nostr:note178tfxt6r98e4huv5d8vv7u8x0nkhclt0whcep3z8xutu9uuj4yuqf7syk6

nostr:note10558a40e25t42n7a94cwg68t4y4w0g44z240lqvqfkg6ddlfsr8sw5wudn

nostr:note1emj5lzys3vuenjvmdjtqmzlp90znq08w2f57p2t7xakm2t0rssfql2qhr9

Recommendations

rabble

rabble has been working on censorship resistant social media for years. He was working on Planetary and scuttlebutt before switching to building on Nostr.

You can follow him here

What did you think of today's newsletter?

Your feedback helps me create the best newsletter possible for you.

Please leave a comment and checkout comments from other subscribers and readers. I love hearing from the Bitcoin For Families community ❤️ 🙏🏻

See you again next week!
— Alejandro

This newsletter is for educational purposes. It does not represent financial advice. Do your own research before buying Bitcoin.

"Relays are like the backend servers for Nostr. They allow Nostr clients to send them messages, and they may (or may not) store those messages and broadcast those messages to all other connected clients."

— nostr.how

Decentralization, and the freedom that comes with it, is the main reason why I love Nostr.

At the same time, decentralization is its main weakness.

With Nostr, there is no central server or company to take care of everything for you. You're in charge of your experience when using Nostr clients.

What are Nostr relays

When you use X, Instagram, Threads or Facebook, your client attempts to share your information with the world by uploading it to the servers operated by these companies.

These companies then monetize you (by means of your data) and decide who, if anyone, should see your information. You don't have control over who ends up seeing your posts or if your posts are seen at all.

Nostr stops this madness.

Your Nostr client shares your information by publishing events to Nostr relays that you choose. Later on, your followers request your events from relays of their choosing.

As long as you and your followers have one relay in common, they will receive your events and you will be able to share your thoughts without anyone being able to censor you or tell you who can or can't see your thoughts, pictures, etc.

Herein is the power and the weakness of Nostr.

The power and the reason why Nostr is censorship resistant is that if a Nostr relay refuses to serve your events to your followers, you can publish your events to a different relay. Not a big deal.

The weakness is that you now need to manage a list of relays, monitor them for good behavior and hope that your followers also include at least one of your relays on their list.

Optimizing your relays for experience

When I started using Nostr, one of the big questions was what relays to use and how many?

When you open a client, or refresh your feed, the client needs to query all the relays that you have configured for events from the people you follow, merge the data from all those relays and build a cohesive view that is, for example, ordered based on publishing time.

This means that the longer the list of relays you configure on your client, the longer you will have to wait to get that view.

But what if you have too few relays? What will happen then? Will you be missing events from people you follow? Will they miss your events?

My relay configuration

nostr.wine has solved this problem for me.

Developed by Katie and Mazin, nostr.wine offers a set of free and paid relay servers that solve this conundrum.

nostr.wine
This is a regular paid relay. It costs money to run relays and so it makes sense to pay for their usage. Remember: freedom is not free.

Go to https://nostr.wine to subscribe to the nostr.wine relay for a one-time fee of 18,888 sats.

filter.nostr.wine
This is the key relay. This relay aggregates and publishes events from and to a wide range of public relays so that I only need to query one relay but I get the benefit of being connected to a large set of relays.

The subscription is time based with a minimum of 30 days. I subscribed for 2 years for 120,000 sats and I'm happy to support the Nostr developer community.

Go https://nostr.wine/add-time to add time and test this relay.

welcome.nostr.wine
wss://welcome.nostr.wine is a free and read-only relay that only aggregates events from new nostr users and displays them in the global/universe view.

This is a great way to get exposed to new users. Take the opportunity to welcome them and maybe give them a follow.

nostr.land
I'm also subscribed to a second paid Nostr relay to spread the love to the Nostr developer community.

Here is my current list of relays:

• wss://welcome.nostr.wine
• wss://nostr.wine
• wss://filter.nostr.wine/npub1er0k46yxcugmp6r6mujd5qvp75yp72m98fs6ywcs2k3kqg3f8grqd9py3m?broadcast=true
• wss://eden.nostr.land

Do you have a different relay configuration that you prefer? Please share it in the comments section.

Notable notes

nostr:note134psu0r0y40pc5yarchx6ycj7e86tj8gnfv4f8hfj8uhs3ddjg5sa4xury

note:note1zppeq00vuqkzvyevg9gnfjwazn688044e4e8jj5g5nv65c6lmlcqap8sm8

Recommendations

Katie Ann Baker and Mazin Khoury

Katie and Mazin are busy making Nostr the place for social interactions.

They are now onboarding creators to https://creatr.nostr.wine/, a place for creators to share AND monetize their work with freedom.

You can follow Mazin here and Katie here.

What did you think of today's newsletter?

Your feedback helps me create the best newsletter possible for you.

Please leave a comment and checkout comments from other subscribers and readers. I love hearing from the Bitcoin For Families community ❤️ 🙏🏻

See you again next week!
— Alejandro

This newsletter is for educational purposes. It does not represent financial advice. Do your own research before buying Bitcoin.