@rabble

This might be naive, but would using merkel trees for the feeds allow a user to force a rebase of their feed? If for example, somebody needed to delete something. They could post a 'this feed has been rebased at x hash' on their feed, then post something a link to what the new hash for that content would be after each content which references the orphaned hash for the content?

I'm having trouble parsing that paragraph. Are you suggesting a way of deliberately forking and then later merging the feed? If so, I think the fundamental problem with that is that the feed needs to stay valid even if only a subset of its messages are known. So no subset of the feed may look like it was forked in the usual, forbidden way. Also, I don't quite see how this is related to merkle-trees rather then simple linked lists. So I guess I'm missing something?

As usual with deletion, the following caveats apply:

• you can't reliably delete any data that ever left your machine
• a whole bunch of things rely on ssb feeds staying immutable
• application-level "please ignore this message"-messages are already possible today
• the freedom to locally delete content while retaining the ability to verify a feed is something we could get trough #offchain-content, no need for merkle-shenanigans there

And finally: As a German, I find the idea of a merkel tree is somewhat disturbing