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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

#41

Post by moojd »

TimJRobinson wrote: post #30
alephnan wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

For sure, any network without any moderation is going to quickly fall into chaos. I'm working on a post on decentralized personalized moderation at the moment which should be out in the next day or two :)

I think this right here is a killer app for decentralized social networks and is something I've been thinking about a lot. I'm looking forward to your post!

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

#43

Post by sneak »

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…

When I was faced with this (signing a structure), I serialized the json into base64, then put that base64 string as a value (along with the MAC) into a new json document. It of course increases deserialization overhead (json, verify, unbase64, inner json) but sidesteps this issue.

I thought about sorting keys and other things like that, and the dozen edge cases and potential malleability issues dissuaded me for the compatibility issues mentioned above.

How have others solved it?

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

#44

Post by goliatone »

alexh1 wrote: post #40
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

I did something similar for a project that had clients in go and node. I solved this by flattening the object key paths to strings and sorting the keys, basically. You need to build that into the client serialization/deserialization, it feels clunky but I had 0 issues and has been working smoothly for a long while now.

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

#45

Post by justusthane »

oosh0Jai wrote: post #9
z0mbie42 wrote: post #3

I recently discovered SSB and was really intrigued. I would love to hear an experience report from actual users like what is working great, and what is bad.

I've been using ssb for about a year and a half, and love it. The ideas behind the dweb do not get the credit they deserve, IMO : p2p data sharing where your data is sent directly to your friends rather than centralized on a know-it-all server is what the world needs, for anyone concerned about privacy. 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…

How do you get connected to the scuttleverse? Did you already know people who were also using it?

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

#46

Post by sneak »

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.

Moderation feeds can be published into decentralized networks just like the content messages themselves. Then readers can choose their set of preferred moderators (author/item killfile-stream publishers) to apply clientside.

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

#47

Post by SyrupThinker »

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…

After reading about the protocol I came to a similar conclusion as you. Although it needs to be noted that the JSON serialization is defined as JSON.stringify as defined in ECMA-262 6th Ed. plus some more.

To me it's worse that key order must be preserved, which this standard does not specify the way I understand it.

Source: https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-protocol-guide/#message-f...

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

#49

Post by SyrupThinker »

jariel wrote: post #39
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.

Then you probably want https://scuttlebutt.nz/ instead, which is more of a user introduction.

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

#50

Post by oosh0Jai »

justusthane wrote: post #45
oosh0Jai wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using ssb for about a year and a half, and love it. The ideas behind the dweb do not get the credit they deserve, IMO : p2p data sharing where your data is sent directly to your friends rather than centralized on a know-it-all server is what the world needs, for anyone concerned about privacy. 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…

How do you get connected to the scuttleverse? Did you already know people who were also using it?

Nope, I used a "pub", which are bot accounts that give you an invitation and auto follow you to boot the network. The way to use them is described here : https://scuttlebutt.nz/get-started/

It's a bit cumbersome, but the purpose is to avoid having any central authority, if I understood correctly (well, except the server running the webpage on which pubs are listed :] ).

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