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@ Anthony Accioly
2025-03-08 21:58:39
Warning: Long rant (but meant to be informative).
Yes, Amethyst can do it. And fiatjaf is actively campaigning against the way it is implemented because, from his perspective, it’s implemented in a generic and complex way that makes it difficult for other clients to support. This may result in potentially vastly different experiences across clients even for fundamental types such as short notes. The main argument here is that "all powerful" editing capabilities may fractures the Nostr ecosystem. There are plenty of alternative proposals for editing notes, but as far as I know, not much concrete has been done to implement them and gather user feedback.
On the other side, there’s nostr:nprofile1qqsyvrp9u6p0mfur9dfdru3d853tx9mdjuhkphxuxgfwmryja7zsvhqpzamhxue69uhhv6t5daezumn0wd68yvfwvdhk6tcpz9mhxue69uhkummnw3ezuamfdejj7qgwwaehxw309ahx7uewd3hkctcscpyug (Amethyst’s developer), whose argument is basically: It’s useful, and users use it. If they want it, they get it.
Disclaimer: I use this feature myself, just like I edit posts on Mastodon, LinkedIn, Reddit, and a gazillion other places. From a selfish perspective, I’m happy with it. And I also don’t think that not seeing edits on other clients is a big deal for my own use cases. Yeah, zapping a post that originally said “I love kittens” only to see it later changed to “I loathe kittens” somewhere else isn’t great. But I can live with that if it means I can fix my own typos.
Then there’s everyone else: "Nostr influencers" doing whatever they do, folks who want Nostr to be like an "immutable" blockchain, people who oppose edits due to possible abuse (or a myriad of other reasons), and those who love editing and don’t want it taken away. Overall, there are devs supporting both sides, some taking strong stances, others just shrugging it off.
Every few weeks, someone brings this up again. Honestly? Neither side is likely to change their mind. So we’re stuck in an endless debate that will either remain unresolved or be settled by adoption metrics.
My take? Things will likely stay as they are, at least for a while. If they do change, either Amethyst’s editing features will become the de facto standard and other popular clients will slowly adopt it to survive, or a better standard will emerge and Amethyst will have to conform.
Hopefully, this was informative. See you all in a couple of weeks when this topic resurfaces again. :)