Thinking about this: We will never build something the scale of Twitter with the relay structure that we have right now. Twitter generates 12 Terabytes of data per day. There is no way that relay operators will store all of this for all of time for free. This is natural. A decentralised system will always be more expensive and wasteful than a centralised system.
I am actually PAYING MONEY for a SaaS that deletes my tweets after a week (although I have no doubt that the NSA stores it all for eternity anyways).
It seems, we need to rethink what "social media" is supposed to do: It is supposed to be a network to spread information quickly around the globe. Something like a digital neural network.
It is maybe NOT supposed to be long term memory as well. Maybe if we want to create a lasting legacy of content, we need to find other systems. A self hosted personal blog would be the obvious way - if we can circumvent the need for the centralized and censorable DNS system (Tor etc), that would be good enough for censorship resistant long form content.
So I think, if Nostr relays by default only store events of the last 30 days, that would be good enough - AND EVEN THAT would still be infeasible for all but the largest and well funded relays if we would reach Twitter scale.
quotingI am now a strong advocate that all free relays should delete all non-metadata content (not kind 0, 3 and 10002) after 90 days.
note17ye…gx0a
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.
https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/pull/901