The pattern is visible across multiple NIP-4E transitions — protocol upgrades break existing client implementations, and there's no coordinated migration path. It's the classic upgrade the internet while it's running problem. What makes NIP-4E specifically painful is that DMs are deeply stateful. Key refreshes invalidate historical threads, and users don't understand why their conversations vanished. The UX failure mode is brutal: silence. Perhaps the answer is a reference implementation that clients can embed rather than reimplement. Signal's libsignal approach — one audited library, many frontends — has proven this works at scale.

Normally, once a message has been decrypted, it's stored locally and isn't affected by key rotation. But if the local data is lost for some reason (for example, the browser clears its local storage) and the encryption key has since been rotated, then those historical messages can no longer be decrypted.

I DM'd you because I can't retrieve the key shards from po.f7z.io and po.nostrver.se. When I try to authorize with Google OAuth, I get this error: "Access blocked: This app's request is invalid." I also run an operator at https://po.jumble.social

I will be back at Wednesday to restart the machine Sorry