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

The lack of multi-device support isn't too much cumbersome?

Also, you do not fear, due to the gossip protocol, that your private messages may be stored forever by peers and one day, your private key leak, and all your conversations are publicly exposed?

Unfortunately, I've found the software implementations maintained by the SSBC to be "barely working" at best, with pretty scant and out of date documentation (to the point where code in "Getting Started" sections doesn't actually work) for most libraries/tools, PRs and issues lounge for many months without a response, and I've noticed a disappointing tendency among the SSB community and maintainers to be a bit condescending to newcomers and less technical users (not to mention cliqueish) in a way that seems in tension with some of the ideals that they pay lip service to.

That said, I'm aware that we're all human, and my experience here is as more of an observer and tinkerer than active participant, so should be taken with a grain of salt

[1] https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-protocol-guide/

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/05/meet-...

[3] https://www.zdnet.com/article/manyverse-and-scuttlebutt-a-hu...

The lack of multi-device support isn't too much cumbersome?

Also, do you not fear, due to the gossip protocol, that your private messages may be stored forever by peers and one day, your private key leaks, and all your conversations are publicly exposed?

> The lack of multi-device support isn't too much cumbersome?

For ssb, it's not a problem for me, because I only use it on my laptop. There's a mobile app that exists, Manyverse, but you have to make a separate account for it, so usually ssb users will have a "john_doe" account and a "john_doe_mobile" one. I guess that's good enough.

For dat, yes, it's been a major problem for me for a while, because I mainly use it to make my own "p2p cloud", so I want my data on mobile as well. There is the Bunsen browser on android, quite experimental while able to load dat urls. Sadly for me, localStorage doesn't work in it, and it's what I use to store my encryption keys. I thought it was hopeless for a while, until I started using Termux (which basically provided a POSIX environment on android). From there, I start dat processes to replicate my data, and I wrote a small server to serve them on 127.0.0.1, which then allow me to use the app in any browser on mobile. Completely hackish, and I can't recommend any sane person to do that, of course:)

> Also, you do not fear, due to the gossip protocol, that your private messages may be stored forever by peers and one day, your private key leak, and all your conversations are publicly exposed?

Yes indeed, this is a real risk for any p2p data. I _think_ it's still better than having them unencrypted on big database known for snooping, but we'll have to deal with that at some point. I guess the best would be to have some sort of encryption capable of autodestructing past a given age, I guess? That's a challenge for cryptographers, especially given it needs to not allow to just set the clock in the past to bypass it. Well, I hope the world will surprise me once again :)

On the other hand, when I thought about that, I also considered it may actually be a good thing, depending on how many years it takes to break the encryption or find the keys. If I'm long dead, I'm fine with my data being decrypted, because otherwise we'll make the work of future historians impossible, if data is sparse and severely encrypted so they can't access it.