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Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook

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Re: Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook

#301

Post by rapnie »

jeswin wrote: post #12
hackbinary wrote: post #5

I thought this was being done by Diaspora? https://diasporafoundation.org/ What's new/different here over this and other efforts?

Diaspora is federated, which for non-technical users is worse than FaceBook itself. The individual nodes (to which thousands of users are connected) will have far fewer resources to secure themselves than a behemoth like FaceBook. Also, uptime, badwidth etc. ScuttleButt is peer to peer, somewhat like torrents but for data feeds.

a nice thing you have with Diaspora is it is adopting ActivityPub, an open standard by W3C, and thus being able to interconnect with e.g. PeerWeb and friendi.ca and other future impls.

curious what thoughts on this are.. could it be incorporated wit SSB (or Dat Project for that matter), or fundamentally different (ActivityPub is also federated, but doesn't have to be.. though i'm no expert on this).

Re: Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook

#302

Post by kyledrake »

agmcleod wrote: post #45
notheguyouthink wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's worse than facebook because there's no one to have responsibility to be accountable. I guess I just don't understand what accountability there is to be even had? If I send an encrypted message to my friend, who is accountable? What are they accountable for? If I'm sending illegal content to someone only I can be held accountable (and possibly the person I'm sending to) . Is that any different in Scuttlebutts c…

Ah i think i may have misunderstood how the system is made. It is purely peer to peer. So any issues could be if the software has a security vulnerability, but I'm not sure how that ties in with things like "as-use" open source licensing. This post explained the network fairly well I found: https://staltz.com/an-off-grid-social-network.html As far as GDPR goes, you're right because you're specifically choosing people…

> having a mechanism to delete your messages on other people's systems when they sync would probably go a long way.

It is my understanding at the moment that it's not scientifically possible to do this. If I'm mistaken I would love to hear a proposal for doing this, but I don't understand how full read access can be revokable once you have the data and a way to decrypt it. DRM doesn't count/work.

Re: Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook

#303

Post by LinuxBender »

nanomonkey wrote: post #73
LinuxBender wrote: post #33

Perhaps I am being dense, but I don't see a public repo with the source code and technical documentation. Is this an open source framework? What language is it written in?

It's written in nodejs, here is the repo: https://github.com/ssbc/secure-scuttlebutt

Ah, I was being dense. Thankyou! I've never run anything with nodejs before.

Re: Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook

#304

Post by Vendan »

3eto wrote: post #283
Vendan wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had expressed interest in changing it, but it would require changing the core data structure the network is built on, and basically be a breaking change that would almost inevitably result in having to start the entire social web over from scratch. Didn't see huge interest from the devs in doing so.

What are the potential downsides of not changing it?

Makes it difficult to implement the protocol in anything but node.js (and potentially version specific, if node.js ever decides to tweak json serialization stuff)

Re: Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook

#305

Post by KirinDave »

xj9 wrote: post #297
KirinDave wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Why did you ask me a question totally unrelated to my post? I am not sure that I do think $$whatever_organization can do better, but perhaps it has more resources to issue corrections.

Re: Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook

#306

Post by dragonwriter »

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…

Perhaps more to the point, the need for canonicalization in this use case is well understood from not only canonical S-expressions, but similar things done in XML and other cryptographically signed structured data formats. While not using one of the existing formats is not necessarily a bad thing, overlooking the well-established need for canonicalization is quite bad.

Re: Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook

#307

Post by 18pfsmt »

Bizarro wrote: post #285
Terr_ wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, I'm pretty sure when they said "legislatures" they were implying the imperfect-but-normal ongoing political process. The one which stretches across dozens of different countries and with some influence by the billions of non-legislator citizens. Instead you seem to be a hurry to travel down a road that sometimes ends with the word "Statist" getting thrown around as an epithet against heretical outsiders. >…

Let's apply the same logic to non-digital goods and services: Do you believe it is fundamentally wrong for a government -- even with significant public support -- to interfere with one anonymous man's Galtian quest to sell radium toothpaste by mail? Amazing...even after I point out his janky biology analogy, you go ahead and try one yourself. You people can't help but to double down.

Some people are interested in designing systems where no central authority can control anything, while others are more interested in determining which entity should have control over everything.

Re: Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook

#308

Post by lgierth »

3eto wrote: post #283
Vendan wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had expressed interest in changing it, but it would require changing the core data structure the network is built on, and basically be a breaking change that would almost inevitably result in having to start the entire social web over from scratch. Didn't see huge interest from the devs in doing so.

What are the potential downsides of not changing it?

Objects in JSON are per the spec unordered, while the signature scheme here most likely relies on the order of the object's key-value pairs.

Other data formats that are ordered, and serialize somewhat more deterministically, are CBOR, Protobufs, or s-exp.

Re: Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook

#309

Post by Kalium »

gregknicholson wrote: post #248
Kalium wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're absolutely right! A protocol doesn't need a business plan. Of course, a protocol by itself isn't very useful. You need services using it and systems implementing and supporting it, which do cost money and require some kind of resourcing model...

You don't need services when you can just use tools. Is Morse code less useful because of the lack of viable Morse code service providers?

You're once again absolutely right! You can use tools without service providers.

You can use Morse code without any service providers whatsoever! Though using it to send messages solely to yourself might not be the best of all possible uses, it's absolutely a viable use.

Similarly, you could implement SMTP for yourself on paper. It might not be quite what was intended or maximally useful, but it's certainly a use. Some people might opine that it's far more useful with services implementing it widely and making its benefits available to many. I can't say they're being wildly unreasonable.

Re: Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook

#310

Post by Kalium »

fabianhjr wrote: post #217
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…

> 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…

> There are no instances, only peers. (Pubs are sort of easy to connect to peers and there is work being done on peer discovery to outdate most pubs; they could still be used to connect communits around topics, hobbies, etc as a way to reduce the distance between peers)

Why do you draw this distinction between "instances" and "peers"? A conventional understanding of the word "instance" would suggest it means "a running instance of the software system in question", which would suggest the word has no meaning distinct from what "peer" would mean in this context. Am I missing a critical and non-obvious distinction?

> There is no retweeting/sharing

My experience is that users really like these features.

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