Scuttlebot: Peer-to-peer database, identity provider, and messaging system

Scuttlebot: Peer-to-peer database, identity provider, and messaging system
scuttlebot.io

I would love to hear an experience report from actual users like what is working great, and what is bad.

I wish there was more info on how the replication worked...

I hosted SSB pubs and used to post on patchwork semi-regularly.

I thought it worked pretty well as a social network. I discovered new and interesting ideas from folks that I don't see much on mainstream social media.

I haven't followed the space much recently, and I'm curious about how it has evolved over the last year or so.

My favorite memories on SSB:

Someone promoted a book that they had written, and we arranged for a sales transaction by talking purely over the network. I sent them some amount of Bitcoin, and they sent me the PDF of their book. It felt very personal to work with the author directly, and side-step payment processors.

I loved taking my laptop out on the train or to a coffee shop, and replying to threads and publishing a post to SSB while offline. Something about reading other peoples ideas while disconnected, and then writing my thoughts, and having them automatically sync to the network when I got back on my WiFi at home, gave me a different perspective on ways to use technology.

If I had to say what I don't like about ssb, it would probably be that it's not easy to write an application for it. After trying for a while, I turned to Dat and the Beaker browser, which let me write frontend applications the usual way, with just an api to manage the p2p archives.

Both dat and ssb are javascript projects, so if you want to write your dweb applications using an other language, you're out of luck. I heard there is a rust implementation of dat being worked on that will allow to access an ABI, and thus write bindings for other languages, if it gets to conclusion.

Also, for all dweb stuff, the main current problem IMO is privacy. You can make private discussions on ssb, you can add an encryption layer on top of dat/beaker (I made myself a library using libsodium, that's good enough), but the main focus is about publishing things for the world, like you publish blog posts.

All in all, on my free time, I'm now more interested to work on the dweb than on the web, so I can only encourage people to toy with it.