That is security theatre though, if we’re being straightforward. First the user has to go through the UI motions to actually select the message and choose “reply” (swipe right or whatever the client demands). Probably 90% of the time the user is replying to the most recent message in the timeline, and if that’s the case it’ll be very rare that the user will actually select that message and hit reply. That feels silly. They *might* use the reply option if it’s some messages a few screens up in the timeline and they want to make clear that they're replying to that one and not the most recent one. But even then many people will just post a new message and let others work things out from context. So already maybe 90% of these gaslighting attacks get through with no chance of reply-based detection. And even in the rare instance that a user has formed this explicit reply habit, the attacker just has to spread the thing being proposed over a few messages, say three of them clean (sent to all) and only one a gaslit one. The user will have to reply to the gaslit one for the gap to show for others, but the user will have no idea which of the four relevant messages is the gaslit one, in client terms they're all identical. And then there are all the false positives, people just turn off or ignore the gap warnings since they show up all the time due to standard Nostr hiccups. It’s like being in a building with a fire drill every day, after a week nobody assumes it could be a fire. What's the false positive to actual attack ratio going to be here? And then you need the clients on both sides to implement the reply logic in such a way as there are no interop issues. Maybe some clients are out of sync with each other and missing parents just aren’t surfaced. So now maybe 95% of gaslighting attacks don’t get detected this way. Or 99%? Anyway, enough that. it can fairly be called security theatre. And then there are the attacks where you strategically don't send a message to a specific person or people, and you do this carefully, several times, over long periods. Very subtle but potentially just as harmful. Those attacks you can't catch out with the reply button at all, even theoretically. Keeping groups small doesn't help either. Groups of 4 to 5 are actually the ideal size for this type of social engineering. Too large and the attacker risks some random person in the group feeling like something in the conversation flow just isn’t right and saying something about it, triggering a ‘compare notes’ discussion. For small groups, the members of which *don’t* trust each other like old friends, and are not tech-savvy enough to know to not blindly trust the chat history (and why not), then it can be a social engineering risk, again depending on the chat context. The NIP17 narrative is privacy, which people naturally understand as security too, and if that spreads you will get such groups making decisions in what they believe to be a secure space. And you will get those who see this as an opportunity for social engineering. Perhaps the social engineer will be the one to suggest a NIP17 group in the first place, since this is exactly what they’d be looking for, something ostensibly private and secure but in reality very open to manipulation. For Nostr devs who understand what's going on, it's fine. But for normies who have natural expectations about how chat groups work in this day and age it's unfairly insecure.