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Scuttlebutt social network: a decentralised platform

scuttlebutt.nz

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Re: Scuttlebutt social network: a decentralised platform

#101

Post by r3trohack3r »

pcloadletter_ wrote: post #37

At this point my decentralized social network is RSS. Just the right level of interactivity for me!

SSB is basically RSS, but with nice guarantees to prevent the RSS server from lying to you!

Take an RSS feed and do the following:

* Hash each entry in your RSS feed including the hash from the previous entry in the feed

* Sign that hash with your private key

You now have the original SSB data structure!

It has overhead. It adds 64bytes for the signature and 32bytes for the hash.

But that overhead is pretty small for most RSS feeds I've seen.

Re: Scuttlebutt social network: a decentralised platform

#102

Post by evbogue »

rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote: post #95

I really don't see why decentralised social networks are any better privacy-wise than centralised. If big corp has financial incentives to gather and use your data, then smaller servers do, too. At least big corp is a legal entity that you can sue.

The original Scuttlebot protocol docs are sadly no longer accessible via a website, but we still have archive.org!

https://web.archive.org/web/20230416142631/https://scuttlebo...

Scuttlebot users encrypted messages onto their append-only log towards recipients using their ed25519 private signing key converted to an ed25519curve encryption key.

This made it possible to send private messages that you could open if you had the private signing key that the messages were directed towards.

Back in the day you could actually send messages using "Private Box" to up to 7 recipients! by appending them to your feed of course.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230322134617/https://scuttlebo...

Re: Scuttlebutt social network: a decentralised platform

#105

Post by ErikBjare »

Solvency wrote: post #59
kstrauser wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The name was the part I liked best! "Scuttlebutt" is a naval term for a water keg, and it became slang for conversation around the watering hole. In other words, it was gossip around the water cooler from before we had water coolers.

...and this is why 99% of niche developer attempts don't flourish into the next big social network. Might as well call it "Codswallop", which is also a valid historical slang that is equally completely ridiculous for mass appeal.

It was never meant to. It was founded by a guy who lived on his boat and wanted something for his friends. It became a hotbed for experimenting with P2P social networks, for a time.

Re: Scuttlebutt social network: a decentralised platform

#106

Post by p4bl0 »

r3trohack3r wrote: post #99
nightpool wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scuttlebutt had the Bitcoin like problem of requiring everybody to have a local copy of the entire database, with a confusing / glitchy "syncing" process to download the latest posts. I tried to use it for a few days on my Android, but it never showed any new posts and the syncing process took like 30 seconds every time I opened the app.

This isn't entirely true. Scuttelbutt had some design and scaling issues. But there wasn't a global database. Each user gets their own blockchain. Its a network of tiny blockchains where the consensus model was the signature from the private key and the chain of hashes.

Not disagreeing with you, just nitpicking on the use of a word:

What you are describing is simply a signed Merkle tree, not a blockchain. You cannot really call an individual signing it's own ledger a consensus mechanism. Maybe "validity" or "authenticity" would be better terms here.

I know a lot of people make this mistake of labelling anything that has a Merkle-tree like structure a blockchain but it's impractical when you need to talk about the technology rigorously to have a word that meant something precise suddenly encompass so many things, including tools such as Git.

Coming back to Scuttlebutt, even the website of Manyverse, the mobile client, explicitly says "no blockchains", so it seems at least some of the people involved in Scuttlebutt development agree with this.

Re: Scuttlebutt social network: a decentralised platform

#107

Post by tazjin »

shp0ngle wrote: post #11

I keep hearing about Scuttlebutt for a long time but haven't seen anyone actually using it? Why? edit: hm, the recommended application on the website itself is ... from 2021, and the github of the app itself is archived now. And there is "bleeding edge" one ... from 2019. OK I can see that there might be problems

It had a major technical flaw in that it depends on some weird, Javascript-only JSON-serialisation bugs (iirc), and these basically had to be reimplemented in other languages so nobody really ended up writing any other clients for it.

Re: Scuttlebutt social network: a decentralised platform

#108

Post by lukan »

rglullis wrote: post #74
yownie wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's not ridiculous and countless FOSS projects will keep banging their head upon the wall forever till they actually learn it.

Please name one FOSS project that has found its success after being renamed to something more "appropriate".

Codemonkey became codemirror. And it is now quite well established (in chrome dev tools for example).

But usually FOSS projects don't get renamed at all, or if they do the renaming causes so much drama that kills the project. So nothing changes, also not obscure design choices - and they remain niche.

Re: Scuttlebutt social network: a decentralised platform

#109

Post by foofie »

jrm4 wrote: post #26
earthwalker99 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I keep hearing about Scuttlebutt for a long time but haven't seen anyone actually using it? Why? It's called Scuttlebutt, meaning it can never be remotely popular enough to function as a worthwhile social network.

Upvoting because I'm also the guy who understands that, similarly, GIMP will never be big as it should be.

Git is pretty popular,and github was bought for over 7 billion.

Re: Scuttlebutt social network: a decentralised platform

#110

Post by foofie »

oli-g wrote: post #48
rglullis wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get not liking a name, but to pass judgement on the quality of a product/project based on its name alone seems like a complete midwit thing to do.

When it's a DB layer, sure. When it's a social network? "Hey guys, have you seen Dave's new post on Poopypants?"

"Hey guys, have you seen Dave's new tweet?"
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