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

scuttlebot.io

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

#31

Post by Vendan »

Scuttlebutt is a neat concept, burdened by a bad protocol. Signing a message involves serializing a json object, signing it, adding the signature as a field on that json object, and then serializing it again. To verify, you deserialize the message into an object, remove the signature field, and then reserialize it, and verify the signature against that new serialization. This means that all the clients have to have a json serialization that 100% matches the node.js serialization that the majority (totality?) of current clients use. Any other implementation (I wrote one in Go) becomes a nightmare of chasing rarer and rarer differences that prevent verification, and if you miss one before you serialize your own message with it, suddenly you've poisoned your own journal...

All in all, it's something to study and learn from, but I strongly recommend not becoming involved unless you are 100% happy with being tied into node.js.

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

#32

Post by z0mbie42 »

TimJRobinson wrote: post #20

Huge fan of Scuttlebutt and think it could (should) be the future of the social internet. I recently quit my job to write about and work on decentralized tech full time with scuttlebutt being my primary focus. I've written about why I think it's so important here: https://adecentralizedworld.com/2020/03/what-is-scuttlebutt/

It was a good read, thank you!

I also really appreciated your other post[0]. This is what allowed me to understand that SSB is not really a social network but more a p2p protocol to exchange messages where applications can be built on.

[0] https://adecentralizedworld.com/2020/03/a-decentralized-plat...

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

#34

Post by [deleted] »

TimJRobinson wrote: post #20

Huge fan of Scuttlebutt and think it could (should) be the future of the social internet. I recently quit my job to write about and work on decentralized tech full time with scuttlebutt being my primary focus. I've written about why I think it's so important here: https://adecentralizedworld.com/2020/03/what-is-scuttlebutt/

[deleted]

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

#36

Post by moojd »

alephnan wrote: post #25
TimJRobinson wrote: post #20

Huge fan of Scuttlebutt and think it could (should) be the future of the social internet. I recently quit my job to write about and work on decentralized tech full time with scuttlebutt being my primary focus. I've written about why I think it's so important here: https://adecentralizedworld.com/2020/03/what-is-scuttlebutt/

> Decentralized social networks have been tried before, the two most well known are Diaspora and Mastadon. With these services there [is still moderation]... Scuttlebutt is how I believe the social web should function in the future. Even the Hackernews community which lean towards decentralization more so than the general public would still argue there is value in moderation.

It's possible (and important) that moderation can be implemented in a decentralized community. Aether[0] has a really interesting take on it where it is essentially democratic.

[0] https://getaether.net/

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

#37

Post by jariel »

Looks very cool - but to the author, you'll have to write some introductory 'what is this documentation' because the single sentence on the landing page isn't quite enough.

"It's a magofinisticks peer-to-peer storage functionomatic" is how it might read to some people. So what it is, what it does, the value of it, some general overview of the features and how they work would go a long way.

Looks cool though.

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

#39

Post by jariel »

milansuk wrote: post #12

So the homepage of this project is basically documentation. Where others introduce use-cases, you actually teach us how it's done. I love it.

Except for those of us who have no idea really what it is, how it would be used, or what the features really do.

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

#40

Post by alexh1 »

Vendan wrote: post #31

Scuttlebutt is a neat concept, burdened by a bad protocol. Signing a message involves serializing a json object, signing it, adding the signature as a field on that json object, and then serializing it again. To verify, you deserialize the message into an object, remove the signature field, and then reserialize it, and verify the signature against that new serialization. This means that all the clients have to have a…

This is how Cosmos (https://cosmos.network/) deals with signing transactions, caused _major_ headaches for me trying to figure out why my signatures were invalid when sending them from Node.js
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