Can anybody explain the important differences between this and Briar/Bramble[1]?
[1] https://dymaxion.org/essays/briarvision.html previously discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18027949
[1] https://dymaxion.org/essays/briarvision.html previously discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18027949
[Cabal]: https://cabal-club.github.io/
There seems to be a large overlap between the SSB and Cabal communities.
Scuttlebutt is a social network platform where each uxer has a personal diary where each page is a signed message that links to the previous page. to receive updates on someone's diary, you follow the person. on each page, content is free-form. the most common message type is 'post', but there's a chat app (similar to Cabal) that uses message type 'scat_message': https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/applications#scat.
Cabal is a chat app, built using the Dat protocol (https://datproject.org/). Dat has a similar architecture, except the diaries (sigchains) are centered on content rather than people. so to receive updates on a diary, you follow the _content_, which in Cabal is a chat group similar to a Slack group.
Ed: looks like https://github.com/ssbc/scuttlebot/blob/master/README.md has a bit more meat. Still happy to hear any comments. Especially I assume any recipient can prove to a third party that someone said something?
https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-protocol-guide/
> I assume any recipient can prove to a third party that someone said something
All public messages are signed with the author's key, so any third-party can verify it.
Private messages are different, though. You need one of the recipient / sender's keys to decrypt that, and so for a third-party to verify it they would need one of those private keys.
https://github.com/ssbc/secure-scuttlebutt/pull/220
You can now generate an unbox key for a private message send it to a non-recipient for them to be able to access the message, which is really cool. No private key sharing necessary!
So if I say: "let's fight racism!" and you later decide to collaborate with a (now) racist government - you could prove (not merely allege) that I should go to the gulag?
yes, on-chain messages are designed to be "on the record" (https://viewer.scuttlebot.io/%25G7BjZsZr02TPAoIeD%2Bw3WgiAbi...), where the game theory is of an infinitely-repeated game (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repeated_game#Infinitely_repea...) where participants have verifiable knowledge of past game activity, which is useful for trust-based coordination.
our plan is to eventually add a side protocol for off-chain ("off the record") messages which re-use the same cryptographic identities, for all your other conversations. :)
Does it use any kind of DHT like Kademlia? I know you want to avoid singletons but are there any hubs that are DHTs or what? How does discovery work? And do you support Web Push?