I may have found a use case for the abandoned "subject" field that nostr notes had with NIP-13.
It would be great if there was a standard "content id" with every note, so that you could reference notes by their content, rather than an absolute id.
The content id would be a sha256 hash of the content field and pubkey.
What this would enable is replaceable tags for notes. Imagine you could in-place update the tags on a note, similar to a replaceable event.
This would open up so many possibilities:
- Easily delete a note by adding a delete tag.
- Easily update a note by adding a ref tag to the new note.
- Update a note's metadata based on the comments. This may be good for special protocols (like zap giveaways).
This could also help relays with storage, as they could choose to discard notes with older metadata.
I would mainly want this for a simpler way to delete messages, as the current NIP-09 solution is a terrible burden on clients and not well respected by relays.
What other cool things could you, if you could change tags on a note while also preserving the reference id?
cmd /
npub1gg…lulq3
2024-03-01 06:02:48
Author Public Key
npub1gg5uy8cpqx4u8wj9yvlpwm5ht757vudmrzn8y27lwunt5f2ytlusklulq3Published at
2024-03-01 06:02:48Event JSON
{
"id": "cd91719058b41da761147035bc6ef20a72449c5dbae7e8ae5c013a8ca7e7c693",
"pubkey": "4229c21f0101abc3ba45233e176e975fa9e671bb18a6722bdf7726ba25445ff9",
"created_at": 1709272968,
"kind": 1,
"tags": [],
"content": "I may have found a use case for the abandoned \"subject\" field that nostr notes had with NIP-13.\n\nIt would be great if there was a standard \"content id\" with every note, so that you could reference notes by their content, rather than an absolute id.\n\nThe content id would be a sha256 hash of the content field and pubkey.\n\nWhat this would enable is replaceable tags for notes. Imagine you could in-place update the tags on a note, similar to a replaceable event.\n\nThis would open up so many possibilities:\n\n- Easily delete a note by adding a delete tag.\n\n- Easily update a note by adding a ref tag to the new note.\n\n- Update a note's metadata based on the comments. This may be good for special protocols (like zap giveaways).\n\nThis could also help relays with storage, as they could choose to discard notes with older metadata.\n\nI would mainly want this for a simpler way to delete messages, as the current NIP-09 solution is a terrible burden on clients and not well respected by relays.\n\nWhat other cool things could you, if you could change tags on a note while also preserving the reference id?",
"sig": "ef97b242cbaf7a6148bfac209ca4b14110aa6c2b430dcf7d0567479a4a5c74e90dfe891f44f189839a5a183c194b448e59ad7e9cd17cbdf900944cd0dc2b221f"
}