Looks interesting but I think that something like Mastodon is more approachable for a general audience.
why do you think that? i was looking at Mastondon and i can not find out what it's advanced is. e.g. compaired with scuttlebutt
Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook
321–330 of 356 posts
Re: Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook
#322"As soon as I put the card into my phone, Scuttlebutt automatically updates and syncs with the new posts that my friends or I make." Yeah... so I'm out. Where's that card going to fit into my iPhone?
That was just an example for how your data could be transferable for fully offline/airgap type uses. Its not the ordinary use case. The ordinary case is simply that your data resides on your device's storage. https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/getting-started.html has links to more information on how it all works. So far, I like the implementation (I've checked out the patchwork client). The issue for me is the ease of getti…
> I'm a facebook kind of guy and I'm not sure what the solution is when everyone else is on facebook.
Somebody was the first person you knew who was on FarceBook, otherwise, from what you're saying, you wouldn't be on there. Be that someone for your network of family and friends, on a user-respecting platform. May the source be with you ;)
Re: Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook
#323The fact that one cannot delete or modify the history of a feed one "owns" is a show-stopper. Of course, people can always mirror stuff, but that is no argument against modifications.
If one stops to think about it, not being able to ever delete by design is a ludicrous concept when it comes to social networking. It takes relatively isolated cases of people mirroring and publicising stuff without consent to an extreme.
Never expecting to need to delete is akin to expecting that you've peaked in life already and future-you will not be looking back and cringing.
Facebook's "On this Day" feature I believe has helped a lot of people realise this - at least when it comes to users who have been around for ~10 or so years.
It might well be possible that the solution to Facebook and Twitter isn't more internet social networking, but more real life networking. So while some people appear to be raving about the merits of Steemit and Mastodon, many more are probably already too jaded to continue on yet another "social" network. The problem isn't necessarily the technology if the problem is us. Fixing societal and political problems by trying to throw more technology at it isn't the answer.
Re: Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook
#324Hate to be a jerk, but the name is all wrong. Again, I apologize, it's just the mood I'm in, but seriously, the name.
It's probably about as daft as the direction that led to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS - "Bionic Beaver".
Re: Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook
#325Perhaps this is just a depressive thought. But I don't see any of these services taking over Facebook or even making a slight dent. What might happen is that Facebook dies a slow death and none of my friends keep in contact on there. But then none of us really built up and real friendships on there so there's no incentive to start again on another site. I guess, even say we all got our wish and Facebook died, I don't…
I don't think it's so entirely depressing if you can recognise Facebook for what it is and be free enough of it while your "competition" stays there and stagnates.
Focus on what you want from life and ignore the rest.
Re: Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have similar concerns. If I had a magic wand, I'd solve this by splitting Facebook into an infrastructure-and-core-data non-profit and one or more for-profit companies that are building tools or interfaces on that platform. I think there is a natural monopoly for some aspects of this, which is why Facebook is so hard to quit. But I don't think the whole thing need be in private, for-profit hands. Mozilla shows that…
I think decentralisation is the wrong way to look at it. The protocol itself becomes the point of centralisation with many providers implementing in federation. Nothing to stop any of them being commercial (they may have all kinds of ease of use and features on top) or not. Since you lose the network effect of bigger player owning 'footfall' (e.g. ebay), there should be less natural tendency for monopoly and greater…
If the protocol is what makes it work, then it's definitely not centralized. Look at email, for example. I love it, but it's past its prime, because it just doesn't evolve to meet new needs and new mental models.
Contrast this with how well proprietary messaging platforms have been taken up and improved iteratively. Or even look at how Google is advancing GMail. Email is nominally federated, but they have circa a billion users. 44% of US adults report using it, and it's 61% of 18-29 age users.
Re: Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook
#327> 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…
How would the attacker be able to deny access to data?
Re: Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook
#328Looks interesting but I think that something like Mastodon is more approachable for a general audience.
why do you think that? i was looking at Mastondon and i can not find out what it's advanced is. e.g. compaired with scuttlebutt
Simpler concept to grasp, just works in browser alone, looks like twitter.
Re: Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook
#329Earlier 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…
From what I understand, in Peergos the friend list is stored on certain node. Which means software running on that node can see your friend list - which is essentially what happened in CA case, except maybe Peergos does not allow to run third-party apps on private node, but even if they didn't currently, I see nothing preventing from this happening in the future. What happened in CA case, AFAIK, is that users allowed…
Nope. Nothing (apart from your username, which is public) is ever stored unencrypted anywhere. Even your own Peergos server can't see your friend list. It is decrypted by your client when you log in.
We don't currently allow third party apps in Peergos, and when we do they won't be able to access the social graph, nor will they be able to connect to the internet, nor anything else outside peergos. So that data can't be exfiltrated.
Re: Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook
#330Just spent about 30 minutes trying to install and connect to a hub. Ended up at a GitHub bug report with no way forward.
While SSB looks very promising, and I REALLY hope we can re-decentralize the web, SSB seems to have a long way to go to match the simplicity of getting started on a service like FB.