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Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook

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Re: Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook

#291

Post by ensignavenger »

ianopolous wrote: post #266
smsm42 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Scuttlebutt is fully encrypted.. doesn't that make the API vastly more locked down than Facebook/etc? Encryption has nothing to do with it. The whole issue with CA was that they (just as many apps before them) were using Facebook social graph data that was available for them to access via the API. Encryption on any layer has nothing to do with it - if you have access to the API, you get the data. In distributed sys…

You very definitely don't need to expose the social graph to the api. We are doing exactly that in Peergos [1][2]. Your social graph is only stored in encrypted form in your own storage space (in IPFS). The source of a follow request can't be deduced by anyone except the recipient. If you start integrating Tor/i2p hidden services, even global passive network adversaries will struggle to figure out the social graph fr…

If the recipient can access it, then the recipient can grant access to a third party- which is what happened with Facebook/CA. People unwittingly shared the information their friends had shared with them with a third party.

Re: Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook

#292

Post by rapnie »

jeffschofield wrote: post #167
ibdf wrote: post #120

2018 will be the year of "alternative to facebook" apps that are in no way an alternative to facebook. To be an alternative to facebook, it should at least do 50% of what facebook does, and it should be accessible to all. Anything that takes more than 3 steps to get it running it's going to keep people out. And if you keep people out, you don't have a social network, at least not anything like facebook where your gra…

Completely agree. I am very interested in the UI/UX opportunities for training the decentralized generation how to interface with decentralized systems and manage their identities, especially across devices and contexts. This has been my biggest criticism of pretty much all of the attempts at a decentralized version of an existing mainstream web service that I have seen. I love the decentralization community but it o…

very much agree.. i have been making that point (more or less) to the Dat Project community. no interest.

Re: Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook

#293

Post by KirinDave »

tschellenbach wrote: post #2

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…

> 6. Using AI to detect abusive content or spot fake news is much harder if you only have a subset of the data. So it becomes harder to address those concerns in a distributed setting.

Maybe people will have to start paying the market what this data is worth, as opposed to burying it in EULAs and using venture and angel funding to create a next generation data oligarchy more difficult to overcome than any financial oppression?

Re: Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook

#294

Post by KirinDave »

sandov wrote: post #180
tschellenbach wrote: post #2

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…

In my case, I don't care about the "privacy protection" of a given social network: I assume that everything I post is public (except private messages), so I filter what I upload based on that assumption. Things I do care about: -No censorship -Chronological feed -Open source & non-abusive client. (i.e. no tracking what users see or read) -Good usability I don't care about abusive content or fake news. If I see fake n…

> I don't care about abusive content or fake news. If I see fake news, I just stop following whoever posted it.

How do you know? Could you also tell me if my computer has virus, since you seem to have an oracle?

Re: Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook

#295

Post by zeveb »

zeveb wrote: post #147
Vendan wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

example message: { "previous": "%26AC+gU0t74jRGVeDY01...MnutGGHM=.sha256", "author": "@hxGxqPrplLjRG2vtjQL87...0nNwE=.ed25519", "sequence": 216, "timestamp": 1442590513298, "hash": "sha256", "content": { "type": "vote", "vote": { "link": "%WbQ4dq0m/zu5jxll9zUb...KjZ80JvI=.sha256", "value": 1 } } } Signed example message: { "previous": "%26AC+gU0t74jRGVeDY01...MnutGGHM=.sha256", "author": "@hxGxqPrplLjRG2vtjQL87...0nN…

I know that I sound like a broken record, but this is exactly the issue which canonical S-expressions were designed for, and which SPKI wrestled with & solved twenty years ago. The SPKI version of a message would look something like (I've removed the hash property, because I don't think it makes sense for an object to specify the hash to be used to refer to it, but one could add it back in if one wished): (message (p…

One slight correction: I realised later on that in the current draft spec, unquoted tokens must not start with a digit. Thus the example would be:

    (message
     (previous (hash sha256 |XphMUkWQtomKjXQvFGfsGYpt69sgEY7Y4Vou9cEuJho=|))
     (author (public-key (ed25519 |FCX/tsDLpubCPKKfIrw4gc+SQkHcaD17s7GI6i/ziWY=|)))
     (sequence "216")
     (timestamp "2018-04-19T17:53:26Z")
     (content (type vote)
              (link (hash sha256 |DlBH/hCmXfVzks2uY+WIll4aTzxrfBA8m/3GIdX3Vew=|))
              (value "1")))

Re: Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook

#296

Post by fabianhjr »

rapnie wrote: post #290
fabianhjr wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. ... For distributed systems there are more ways to exploit the APIs and gather data on users. However there is no global state, users only push-pull feeds of friends and friends of friends. (In part for privacy and in part for performance, you don't need to carry all the data for a social network to be useful) > 3. GDPR compliance about deleting data is almost impossible in a distributed system. However that doe…

> Pubs are sort of easy to connect to peers and there is work being done on peer discovery to outdate most pubs; this is cool! could you explain more? i thought Pubs were needed to connect with peers on internal networks, to alleviate NAT traversal issues. what i would like to know more about regarding Pubs - but could not find any info on some time ago - is how much it will cost, more or less, to host your own Pub i…

Hi rapnie, I suggest you try the protocol guide, it has a section on pubs: https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-protocol-guide/#pubs

Re: Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook

#297

Post by xj9 »

KirinDave wrote: post #294
sandov wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my case, I don't care about the "privacy protection" of a given social network: I assume that everything I post is public (except private messages), so I filter what I upload based on that assumption. Things I do care about: -No censorship -Chronological feed -Open source & non-abusive client. (i.e. no tracking what users see or read) -Good usability I don't care about abusive content or fake news. If I see fake n…

> I don't care about abusive content or fake news. If I see fake news, I just stop following whoever posted it. How do you know? Could you also tell me if my computer has virus, since you seem to have an oracle?

if you can't tell the difference between real news and fake news, what makes you think `$whatever_arbiter` will do a better job?

Re: Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook

#298

Post by ianopolous »

ensignavenger wrote: post #291
ianopolous wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You very definitely don't need to expose the social graph to the api. We are doing exactly that in Peergos [1][2]. Your social graph is only stored in encrypted form in your own storage space (in IPFS). The source of a follow request can't be deduced by anyone except the recipient. If you start integrating Tor/i2p hidden services, even global passive network adversaries will struggle to figure out the social graph fr…

If the recipient can access it, then the recipient can grant access to a third party- which is what happened with Facebook/CA. People unwittingly shared the information their friends had shared with them with a third party.

That is clearly fundamentally true of any information. The question is what is shared by default. We don't even share your friend list by default, so the exposure is much less.

Re: Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook

#299

Post by GCU-Empiricist »

KirinDave wrote: post #294
sandov wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my case, I don't care about the "privacy protection" of a given social network: I assume that everything I post is public (except private messages), so I filter what I upload based on that assumption. Things I do care about: -No censorship -Chronological feed -Open source & non-abusive client. (i.e. no tracking what users see or read) -Good usability I don't care about abusive content or fake news. If I see fake n…

> I don't care about abusive content or fake news. If I see fake news, I just stop following whoever posted it. How do you know? Could you also tell me if my computer has virus, since you seem to have an oracle?

Maybe doing due diligence, reading a few primary sources, before you choose to believe or act on something?

Re: Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook

#300

Post by rapnie »

ahdinosaur wrote: post #156
f_leon wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. Just tried to give it another shot and there's only 3 public servers and none are currently working

hey, have you tried contacting a private pub? i'm Mikey, owner of `one.butt.nz`, happy to give you an invite if you send me an email! mikey@rootsystems.nz if you want to setup your own pub, i made an automated Digital Ocean installer (also a detailed manual) for a Docker-based pub: http://github.com/ahdinosaur/ssb-pub . i'm also working (with funding from #ssbc-grants) on a hosted pub-as-a-service product: http://but…

i am interested to know about usage characteristics for running a Pub (bandwidth, storage, CPU) to be able to gauge what it will cost me to host one myself.

curious to know about your experience with that.

also is there a way to set rate limits?

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