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Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook

inthemesh.com

201–210 of 356 posts

Re: Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook

#201

I really love the concept of this. I travel a ton and am without internet for days/ weeks at a time. Scuttlebutt allows me to keep up to date with friends and communities while offline and when I do eventually get online, just grab the newest updates and download them locally. This is such a cool thing in my eyes for parts of the world with little / no internet access. The creator of the project (AFAIK) sails around…

What is this "offline" you speak of?

Re: Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook

#203

I think it's fascinating to see distributed social networks from a tech perspective. From what I've seen so far they exacerbate the problems that Facebook has been seeing so much backlash against. 1. The whole Cambridge Analytica issue was caused by APIs that are too open. For distributed systems there are more ways to exploit the APIs and gather data on users. 2. There is a clear issue with Facebook's accountability…

The whole issue with facebook is that they: 1. Follow you from site to site, scooping up all the data they can on you. 2. Allowed all of that data to be accessible not just by you opening up to a bad actor app, but by any of your friends opening up to a bad actor app. Calling it "overly open APIs" is misleading at best. The point of an A P I is that it is a public interface. If Scuttlebut has proper permissions contr…

How can Scuttlebutt prevent (2) from happening? If you share data with your friends, how can you know that they haven't installed an app that will slurp up that data wholesale?

The only solution would to be to enforce reasonable app usage in the client, and then require all your friends to use that client. That seems to defeat the purpose of a decentralised protocol.

Re: Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook

#206

It isn't an alternative to Facebook unless my grandma can use it, and she couldn't set this up for herself. The idea that centralized storage is the problem masks the actual concern. There is nothing inherently wrong with centrally stored data. There is a problem is when it is locked down by a 3rd party, and/or you don't control how it is used.

>It isn't an alternative to Facebook unless my grandma can use it, and she couldn't set this up for herself. Facebook isn't an alternative to email if my grandma can't use it. Computers aren't an alternative to telephones if my grandma can't use it. Telephones aren't an alternative to mail if my grandma can't use it. etc. --- It'll get easier and simpler, I promise.

This is a variant of survivership bias and says effectively nothing.

Just because things have gotten more complicated and people have used them doesn't mean that people will start to use any complicated thing.

For example:

Google+ / Google Wave isn't an alternative to email if my grandma can't use it.

GPG isn't an alternative to talking in-person communication if my grandma can't use it.

... etc

Yes, you have valid examples where things that are relatively complex did become popular, but there are many many more examples of things that were more complicated and failed.

Just because scuttlebutt is complicated is not a reason it will succeed, but is indeed a valid reason it might fail.

Re: Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook

#207

> What makes Scuttlebutt unique is the simple idea that users should own and control all of their data. I find this to be fundamentally wrong. After you post something on Scuttlebutt, you have no control of that data. Sure, it's stored on your computer, but it's also shared with your whole network who now have as much control of it as you have. I'd instead put it like this: > What makes Scuttlebutt unique is the simp…

Can I chip away at that final assertion even more? If the data is easily discovered through crawling the network, and nodes on the network are less resilient than Facebook's sprawling infrastructure, you've potentially given a single attacker control over reading and denying access* to data. There will need to be protocol to mitigate attacks on the network by sharing information between nodes.

*if they can determine where the copies reside

Re: Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook

#208

Anyone else not even use social networks anymore? Privacy or not, it's just garbage. Facebook, myspace, hello, whatever it's all the same crap with different CSS values. Do we even need social networks anymore?

I don't use social networks, unless you consider Reddit, HN and Youtube social networks.
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