I am now a strong advocate that all free relays should delete all non-metadata content (not kind 0, 3 and 10002) after 90 days. Most users not only seem fine with it but don't really care about saving their notes at all. They are here for the moment and not to build a database of posts they can look back on. Those who are here to build content are already paying for relays. Then all free relays should offer a paid option that simply keeps all posts for as long as the user pays. Relays can use the NOTIFY spec to warn users they are about to delete some of their stuff.

Replies (147)

What about saving bookmarked events? Typically the only things people care to go back to are things they've intentionally saved. Otherwise it can be treated as ephemeral data, sort of like a group chat. People aren't usually rereading group chat convos from months ago.
I believe that lack of long term support for relays is damaging Nostr more than helping. Relays that subsidize the network for free are just damaging growth opportunities. But the most important part is that users don't really expect their posts to be saved much more than 90 days. If that is the case, I do think we should meet users where they are at and simplify operations.
This makes sense to me. I want my notes so I run my own relay. I don’t expect that they’d be archived on any other relay (even paid tbh)
If you use Ditto as a relay, you can actually fight spam and significantly reduce the storage foot print by avoiding nonsense . Nostr is really bad for spam and that will kill the relays
For some weird reason, Mastodon and the Fediverse continues to grow. New instances appear all the time without caring about money. Many do it for free! Amazing isn't it? No incentive whatsoever except to shitpost.
Absolutely.. if and when I want my notes stored in perpetuity , I will be careful enough to install my own relay .. If not , there is no point collecting the garbage .. in fact , everyone must be mandated to remove garbage .. A free public relay should store data for say 30 days .. a paid relay for 90 days .. and a personal relay for as long as you want .. The 90 days limit even on paid ones ensures that the storage price is lowest possible .. so that people really don't mind shelling out say ten sats per message to keep it around for 90 days .. It will clean the system up .. makes the the micro- commerce a habit and incentivize people to offer more small paid relays .. and also to self host ..
I am not a comunist but I provide a free relay and even lightning wallets. It's not about communism. That is low-level thinking, It's about supporting the infrastructure and user and building a community. Can't price that
Evolution
Vitor Pamplona's avatar Vitor Pamplona
I am now a strong advocate that all free relays should delete all non-metadata content (not kind 0, 3 and 10002) after 90 days. Most users not only seem fine with it but don't really care about saving their notes at all. They are here for the moment and not to build a database of posts they can look back on. Those who are here to build content are already paying for relays. Then all free relays should offer a paid option that simply keeps all posts for as long as the user pays. Relays can use the NOTIFY spec to warn users they are about to delete some of their stuff.
View quoted note →
Ah, but they don't if they're approaching habla the same way they would medium. You would assume your publishing platform keeps your content for you. But I am coming around to NOTIFY.
After this post, and the discussion yesterday, it would be nice to have some sort up to date documentation on running a relay and what is available. I am toying with the idea, but I haven't found to much info...there are a gazillion github projects our there, I wouldn't know what to use or not.
The possibility that my shitposting is saved for eternity on some relay worries me. Automatic deletion welcomed ✌🏻
I'm here to see the cathedral get built and interact with the builders as they do it. Nsecs and relays seem like the much better approach compared to activitypub
You are right! If Nostr wants to kick ass, do Nsecs and relays but everything else like Mastodon/Pleroma Then, Nostr can be taken seriously . Alex Gleason is doing this now for Nostr with Ditto/Soapbox and it's beautiful.
I don't know, I'm someone who does something to last. Now, I'm willing to pay for it lasting. But Nostr - although I love the ideal - is not exactly a bee hive of a creative trusted network at this point. So, early payment with little value in return is ... it's a risky approach. Naturally as a value content creator you wanna go back to your note of 3 years ago and repost or assess what changed. Unless you shitpost which is good for five minutes and has fiat money kind of appeal.
Maybe some relays would be interested receiving by note payments from a 3rd party for longer storage time for cases like that? Of course there'd have to be disclaimers about no guarantees or whatever since it could be deleted.
But I am leaving to them. I am just advocating for it. They decide whatever they want to do. My job is to make sure the relay network is sustainable. We have seen too many operators going away in the past year. We are going to lose them all if we don't offer better incentives. Subsidizing works for a while but it comes to byte you in the ass when you need resources.
I think without the ability to do that you’d see a lot of people copy an old post they want to keep up and paste it into a new post, which is annoying UX.
Just a little concerned about the inability to distinguish true history. We may end up having no way to know what really happened in the past.
Vitor Pamplona's avatar Vitor Pamplona
I am now a strong advocate that all free relays should delete all non-metadata content (not kind 0, 3 and 10002) after 90 days. Most users not only seem fine with it but don't really care about saving their notes at all. They are here for the moment and not to build a database of posts they can look back on. Those who are here to build content are already paying for relays. Then all free relays should offer a paid option that simply keeps all posts for as long as the user pays. Relays can use the NOTIFY spec to warn users they are about to delete some of their stuff.
View quoted note →
Also, other npubs reposting your note (finding value in it) would keep it alive in the network. Or am I mistaken about the repost mechanism?
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bitcoinmoa 1 year ago
I'm down with that. I might be in the minority but I like the ephemeral nature of Nostr. Makes interactions feel more special.
What do folks think about layered approach where say the most recent 30-90 days is readily available but longer than that is archived and available on demand?
Satellite might be using LTS based upon a relay. Maybe you could find out which one it is and add it to your Amethyst settings. Citrine is fine for backup. Use nos.today for searching. They've got elasticsearch running and it finds everything findable.
But how would you even know if other clients were respecting it. I discovered purely by accident that some clients let you see who's zapping who, while most clients don't. In that scenario, how you you write a script for what you can't see. Unless you watched every client out there?
This is a very good recommendation: relays where you can pay for long-term storage If you’re technically literate/advanced, you could also run a private relay and ensure all of your posts are sent there.
Yeah, I would like to ditch Nostream and figure out how to do a paid relay on stirfry i also want to levrage my nostrcheck server more. The noster check server has APIs for user registration and NIP-05 and I'd like to unify that a little bit more so people can actually Register as a user of the server and maybe pay for retention if they want to. And make the Nip-05 section of my services a little less clunky. Basically I just want to unify all the shit that I host so it becomes a more seamless service.
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Karadenizli 1 year ago
I think a compromise would be to delete notes that receive no interaction or have a 30 day delete timer that resets every time the note receives interaction. I'm not a node operator but I'd bet 90% of their data is notes no one ever sees again.
That's mostly how Mastodon servers handle it. You post and post and post, but the oldest stuff starts going away. I think the only instances that keep anything forever are the ones like mastodon.social that's bankrolled by the millionaire who created it
Why would I want my past posts deleted? Every post has potential of getting zapped in the future. Every little zap counts even if it's one Satoshi. How are people gonna make money if their past posts get deleted. I might find an old post I like and zap it. I'm going to have to setup my own relay as it seems like lately the talk of relays going away. I'm still trying to understand relays. It doesn't make sense to me. The relay settings are confusing and I'm not sure what I am supposed to do. I remember receiving a pop-up from the nostr . wine relay asking me to pay and it thought it was spam. Nostr takes time to learn. We need a system where we can download our data and move relays. The relay websites also don't explain what we are paying for. Nostr is overwhelming to learn. We need time.
I have one paid relay and several free ones. What happens to my notes?
Running a relay costs money, time, server power & lots of HD space. As more users use your relay it becomes almost a full-time job. It looks like the relays will end up on the same path as image hosting websites. This is why I bought my own image hosting software "chevereto" and I am hosting my own images because I figure the nostr image hosting websites will end up on the same path as the original image hosting websites decades ago. They all went bankrupt and all the images I uploaded on their websites went bye. I'm not sure if I'm up to the task of setting up my own relay. That's some advanced cli linux docker stuff. It will be sad when relays start disappearing because there is also no way to export/import our notes to a new relay. Read the note at the very bottom. The idea that is passed on to relay operators is that they should purge old notes due to the fact that HD space is limited once the relay starts to become popular and used by many. The issue with deleting previous notes and only keeping a months worth of notes is that your previous notes could be missing out on getting zapped. Every Satoshi counts! Paying for a relay is a good option. The only issue is understanding how paid relays work. #cheverto #imagehosting #relays
Vitor Pamplona's avatar Vitor Pamplona
I am now a strong advocate that all free relays should delete all non-metadata content (not kind 0, 3 and 10002) after 90 days. Most users not only seem fine with it but don't really care about saving their notes at all. They are here for the moment and not to build a database of posts they can look back on. Those who are here to build content are already paying for relays. Then all free relays should offer a paid option that simply keeps all posts for as long as the user pays. Relays can use the NOTIFY spec to warn users they are about to delete some of their stuff.
View quoted note →
That is not always the case. Many times clients just create a new note with an nostr:nevent1qqs... reference, meaning the quoted reply note can survive whatever its replying to. You see this in action when you see a note with a quote reply and it's content is: "This note is not available on any of your relays"
I don't understand what increases with usage? CPU? Memory? Disk space? At the scale of nostr, it all seems pretty easy to handle. And why have relay operators left? Solely due to hosting costs? Admin time overhead? Are there any real surveys on the reasons relay operators exit nostr? I run relays/servers for various networks and average around 500 Mbps on the connection. I have unlimited 1Gbps xfer for the cost of the rack. What would it take run a really busy nostr relay? What is a really busy nostr relay in terms of hardware and bandwidth utilization?
This sounds reasonable, but the 30 days are a bit harsh. (at least to start with)
Their must be a preserving option. Or a shitpost checkbox to tik. Paid or unpaid. That would save a lot of resources.
But couldn't some clients be written to ignore the requests? I remember that happened with usenet. There was a client called News Post that was specifically written to ignore cancel requests. It was also written to ignore moderation requests. What would stop someone doing the equivalent?
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dankswoops 1 year ago
the better solution seems to add toggle UI to each client that adds when the users is okay with notes deleting
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dankswoops 1 year ago
some notes should never die. have you seen that "save the devs" video? its timeless and nostr users 100+years from now would still zap that, whereas random thought notes could easily die. When I used Snort, I loved deleting my old notes or when I over shared. Now on primal, there's no option. adding a slider to notify the relay that this is a banger or an engagement metric along with a uniform request to delete button across all clients would free up tons of relay space.
That's your opinion. Node operators will have their own opinion too.
I understand this from a sustainability perspective, but hard to imagine looking back at some asknostr questions and possibly only seeing my OP with no comments anymore as the relays aren’t persisting the useful replies. I can run a private relay to backup my own notes but it can’t ensure I see related notes
That’s fair. Haven’t read the spec but as an end-user I’d like simple toggles/options for each post. Nothing selected means post auto deletes in 90 days. But if I go in and select to make it a permanent/eternal post I’d pay fee. If I made a mistake and want to delete immediately I would (maybe) also pay. Not sure about this one though, seems like a good way to maintain the current way to make sure you don’t post junk just to do so.
Or just to make sure free relays survive. So many relay operators have given up that we have to change expectations of what "free" gets you.
If you don't pay for your own storage, you don't get to decide when your notes will be deleted. Thats the relay operator's decision. So, with free relays, it's not really up to users to be ok with it or not.
Expiration is different. The note expires for all relays. It doesn't allow you to send an expiring note now and later revert it back to non expiring when you move your notes from a free relay to a longer term storage.
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dankswoops 1 year ago
I thought NOSTR was about freedom. Sounds like a whole lot of control you're imposing here. I respect that server space cost money and am actively thinking about scaling this protocol to over a billion people but your idea of how it operate is very controlling.
There is a difference between a social network and its content, and the Bitcoin blockchain. Few 👈
I disagree and have strong arguments against. First, I'm building an empire of notes, a castle. Second, deletion should be an option. Perhaps one should pay to select posts to delete after a time. In the most difficult POV, I believe from experience that it is the ordinary layperson civilian who talks for the sake of talking without anything constructive over a lifespan. And so on.
If you a building a castle of notes, don't use free relays. Your messages are already been deleted. You just know which ones. Don't make a castle in someone's else property.
Expiring unpaid notes is a great idea, but it's such a big departure from what social media users expect ("wait, I can't even search my old notes? they're 'gone' gone?"). We need to get folks thinking of paid vs. unpaid as a first class component of each & every service, not as an attribute of an entire service by itself (nothing is unpaid, there is no such thing as a free lunch).
Vitor Pamplona's avatar Vitor Pamplona
I am now a strong advocate that all free relays should delete all non-metadata content (not kind 0, 3 and 10002) after 90 days. Most users not only seem fine with it but don't really care about saving their notes at all. They are here for the moment and not to build a database of posts they can look back on. Those who are here to build content are already paying for relays. Then all free relays should offer a paid option that simply keeps all posts for as long as the user pays. Relays can use the NOTIFY spec to warn users they are about to delete some of their stuff.
View quoted note →
Recent notes could be freely accessible and older long tail content could be accessible behind a paywall which can be unlocked by users. This is the most natural form of incentives, if users want the long tail content they should be paying for it. I imagine simple relays on VPS that freely offer recent content and pull older content from Home Server Relays upon request (start9 / Umbrel). When older content is requested it stays cached on the public Relays.
They don't need to keep your posts, just store your interests. That's what's valuable. And generally it's only valuable if they can track the larger accounts. Plebs will get smocked.