Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I spent a few weeks (months?) on Mastodon, and even though I was on a cooperatively owned and operated instance[0] it just wasn't a substitute for a fully p2p social network.

I found another network called Scuttlebutt[1] that I've been using almost daily. It has a few neat features:

- your account is just your public key

- your profile is an append-only feed of JSON messages, each cryptographically signed

- when you follow people you replicate their profile on your device

- messages are transmitted with an eventually consistent gossip network, which is fast and resilient

- you can assign nicknames to yourself and others, and since there isn't a central naming authority (if you have two friends named Matt, you get to disambiguate however you would in real life)

- all data is downloaded locally, so you can view all the same content whether you're online or off-grid

- you can reply while offline and your messages will sync when you peer again (again, think gossip networks)

- there are tons of different clients and implementations and applications running on the network

  - Twitter-like posts  

  - IRC-like chat  

  - blogging  

  - Signal-like private messages
  
  - image search  

  - chess (!)  

  - secret sharding among friends (!!)  

  - mutual credit  

  - by far the best community I've ever been a part of

Anyway, if you want to love Mastodon you might look into Scuttlebutt.

[0]: https://social.coop

[1]: https://scuttlebutt.nz

EDIT: having trouble formatting the list, did I mention that Scuttlebutt supports full Markdown?

Sounds very nice, but Scuttlebutt seems to be for desktop computers/servers only. I can‘t use it on an iPad or on the smartphone...

This is delightful. Scuttlebutt appears to be very much the sort of approach that I was talking about in another thread about 90s app-centric approach.

And here we see the downside of that approach: “it doesn’t support my platform.” The irony being that the unsupported platforms are arguably the last bastions of “I expect a native app.”

All told, I think I’m coming around to the idea that this problem is better than the problems of walled services. This one is fundamentally technological, while the Facebook / Twitter service problem is corrosive to individual privacy and society.

Giving scuttlebutt a try - thanks! Here are my experiences:

1. App seems quite unpolished for Windows, it looks best not maximized. I was asked to provide a name and was a little disconcerted by the message that this is going to be public and cannot be deleted.

2. I've now joined a public server. This required going to a github page, following a link and copying and pasting an "invite" into the Patchwork application. The first one I tried threw and error that I didn't understand, but the second one worked and connected me to over 700 people.

3. The channels page is completely empty.. it seems like all I can see is a feed of people following one another.

4. Problem above solved by re-starting the app! Now taking a long time to download information, but I can see actual content.

5. I posted my first reply to someone's message. You get the prompt reminding you that everything is public and forever every time it seems.

My overall impression after about 30 minutes doing the above is that this is potentially really cool, but a few steps away from being immediately usable by someone who isn't tech oriented. Going to try a few more Scuttlebutt apps as I'm curious how well my identity can transition across different clients.

I'm not a user, but I have been watching it (and its related projects on github). I believe Patchwork[0] is the social network you joined, and it is based on scuttlebutt[1].

It seems like very early times for most people even considering the downsides of centralized 'social media,' and it will take time and hand-holding to demonstrate the alternative possibilities. A great client app that could unify the user experience, but offer power-user features could go a long way. Most people that I know (older) are not overtly interested in participating in any public social network (i.e. Twitter).

I wonder if one could build a more closed, private, white-list-default (triple opt-in!) type of social network on top of SSB with the right client software?

[0] "A decentralized messaging and sharing app built on top of Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB)." https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork

[1] "A database of unforgeable append-only feeds, optimized for efficient replication for peer to peer protocols" https://github.com/ssbc/secure-scuttlebutt

Yep, Patchwork is a Scuttlebutt client that implements some of the most common funxtionality: pubs, following, blocking, posts, likes, replies, and some profile data.

Other clients like Patchbay do that plus more experimental features, but it's all running on top of Scuttlebutt and you can change clients at any time.

If you're familiar with cryptocurrencies, these clients ate like wallets -- there are a ton of different ones with all sorts of pros and cons, but you're still on the same network with the same append-only feeds.

With that said, these are rough around the edges, especially when it comes to entering the network for the first time. We've got a lot of work to do. I appreciate the feedback!

You can export the lists of people you follow, block, or mute, and then import them into your new account at your new instance.

With regards people that follow you, you can mark an account as migrated and leave a forwarding address. People are starting to do this, and it seems to be working reasonably well, although it's obviously not ideal.

This is a difficult problem to solve and people are actively working on it. If you have a suggestion as to how one could create and sustain a presence on one instance, gain a body of followers, and then migrate all that to another instance, then I'm sure people would be interested to hear your thoughts and suggestions.

Would it be interesting to have sort of a signed "302 moved permanently" message that signals to other clients to automatically follow the other account?

But what if the original instance shuts down, or becomes malicious and doesn't cooperate?

In any kind of distributed system there are failure modes you can't protect against, the best you can do is create a mechanism that will work in most cases and go with that.

When you leave you can export the people you follow, and it's likely that without too much trouble you can get the list of people who follow you. I've just done so, and it didn't seem to hard. There isn't really a simple interface for it - I just listed them and saved the HTML, then extracted them from that.

Having got your list of followers you can then ping them to let them know you've moved, and I suspect someone somewhere is working on a way of doing that semi-automatically.

It also discourages from joining smaller instances in the fear that they might go away.