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Comment by hackbinary | Hacker News Reader

I thought this was being done by Diaspora? https://diasporafoundation.org/

What's new/different here over this and other efforts?

Diaspora is federated, which for non-technical users is worse than FaceBook itself. The individual nodes (to which thousands of users are connected) will have far fewer resources to secure themselves than a behemoth like FaceBook. Also, uptime, badwidth etc.

ScuttleButt is peer to peer, somewhat like torrents but for data feeds.

Minor note to readers, it's partially p2p. It uses gossip, so at times your peer might be a semi-centralized server, and at other times it could be a peer.

I know that doesn't make it not p2p, but reading p2p makes me think I need direct connections with peers. Gossip is sort of nifty that way.. though I'm not a fan of semi-centralized redirect servers.

Considering it didn't seem particularly difficult to operate your own relay server, I don't really consider that much of a negative.

Spin up your own relay, generate some invites for your friends, and share all of your gossip through a server that you control yourself.

> Diaspora is federated, which for non-technical users is worse than FaceBook itself. The individual nodes (to which thousands of users are connected) will have far fewer resources to secure themselves than a behemoth like FaceBook

That's a weird argument - it doesn't even make sense no matter how you look at it.

1. Security is more or less centralized as per core code and core protocol. 2. Why do you imply big monolith is secure than a small instance? Where's the logical connection in that?

It's more than the app (whose code and core protocol you've mentioned) - it's keeping OS up to do, firewalls, opsec, watching for suspicious activities: These are all things that facebook (the company) does that need to be taken care of on every pod/node.

If it's federated, it means thousands of accounts are likely going to live on each server - and many of those servers will be easy to hack. It is in that sense the facebook does a better job securing it (and they have shown that they can do opsec) -- not any theoretical "centralized vs distributed" argument.

a nice thing you have with Diaspora is it is adopting ActivityPub, an open standard by W3C, and thus being able to interconnect with e.g. PeerWeb and friendi.ca and other future impls.

curious what thoughts on this are.. could it be incorporated wit SSB (or Dat Project for that matter), or fundamentally different (ActivityPub is also federated, but doesn't have to be.. though i'm no expert on this).

Doesn't sounds like the Diaspora team have any plans to implement AP, which is a shame. Here's a fairly scathing write-up on ActivityPub from a prominent Diaspora dev: https://schub.io/blog/2018/02/01/activitypub-one-protocol-to...

Friendi.ca and Hubzilla can already interoperate with Diaspora using the Diaspora protocol. Here's a good guide to the current landscape of free code, federated social networks here, and which protocols each app supports: https://medium.com/we-distribute/a-quick-guide-to-the-free-n...

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