Today I learned something new about Nostr reactions. It started with what I thought was a small Nostrich bug. I liked a note and removed the reaction. Then I liked it again. After repeating this a few times Nostrich showed several reactions from my own account. Some disappeared later but a few remained. At first I thought this was only a client problem. Then people explained what was actually happening. A reaction is a kind 7 event. Removing it creates a kind 5 deletion event. The problem is that not every relay honors that deletion. So the old reaction can come back when the client queries another relay. One suggestion I really liked was for the client to fetch my own kind 5 events together with my reactions. If one of my reactions has a matching newer deletion then the client can simply stop showing it even if a relay keeps serving the old event. That feels much closer to what a normal user expects when pressing unlike. I started with a strange reaction counter and somehow ended up learning more about NIP 09 and event deletion. Another small Nostr rabbit hole. 😃 I think this kind of thing matters if Nostr wants more normal users in the future. People will expect deleting a comment or removing a reaction to actually work. They will not care which relay ignored which event.

What do you think? Should clients handle this locally when relays do not honor deletion events?

#nostr #nostrdev #nip09 #buildinpublic #relay #nostrich