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 would love to hear an experience report from actual users like what is working great, and what is bad.
I hosted SSB pubs and used to post on patchwork semi-regularly.
I thought it worked pretty well as a social network. I discovered new and interesting ideas from folks that I don't see much on mainstream social media.
I haven't followed the space much recently, and I'm curious about how it has evolved over the last year or so.
My favorite memories on SSB:
Someone promoted a book that they had written, and we arranged for a sales transaction by talking purely over the network. I sent them some amount of Bitcoin, and they sent me the PDF of their book. It felt very personal to work with the author directly, and side-step payment processors.
I loved taking my laptop out on the train or to a coffee shop, and replying to threads and publishing a post to SSB while offline. Something about reading other peoples ideas while disconnected, and then writing my thoughts, and having them automatically sync to the network when I got back on my WiFi at home, gave me a different perspective on ways to use technology.
The lack of multi-device support wasn't too much cumbersome?
My ssb keypair was on a work laptop, so when I changed jobs and had to give my laptop back, I lost my keypair. Now, I could have exported the keypair and continued to use my "account" on my new laptop. The network would have synced on my new device, and I'd get all my posts and pictures back. But decided to embrace the constraint instead.
When I rejoin the network, I'll have a new keypair, and no post history. I think this can have an interesting effect on how we view our attachment to data.
You can do this with Usenet and most BBS's. Most native IM apps will also do this for you, plus of course there's email.
I don't think this feature exists in Usenet and BBS's where there is a central server who masterminds the sync that everyone is doing. Same with email, requires a server (local or remote) to send/receive stuff while in SSB both local and remote are usually the same machine.
UUCP is a store-and-forward mechanism, not dependent on a real-time connection to a particular server. I used to run a node, connected to a guy I'd met who worked for an ISP. He had, gasp, a full-time network connection via ISDN; pretty magical in these days of dial up.
So, Usenet feeds were configured on my own little system, essentially subscribing to the newsgroups I wanted. Periodically, it would dial out to the other gent, upload any new posts from me, and download anything new on those newsgroups. My email came and went the same way. Naturally, what I got was a subset of what he had accessible.
While I never used this functionality, I could have had others call up to me, and I would just be an intermediate link in the chain. RFC 976 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc976) describes how this works for email, including SMTP over UUCP.
That does sound a lot like how Scuttlebot treats feeds as well.
Unfortunately, I've found the software implementations maintained by the SSBC to be "barely working" at best, with pretty scant and out of date documentation (to the point where code in "Getting Started" sections doesn't actually work) for most libraries/tools, PRs and issues lounge for many months without a response, and I've noticed a disappointing tendency among the SSB community and maintainers to be a bit condescending to newcomers and less technical users (not to mention cliqueish) in a way that seems in tension with some of the ideals that they pay lip service to.
That said, I'm aware that we're all human, and my experience here is as more of an observer and tinkerer than active participant, so should be taken with a grain of salt
[1] https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-protocol-guide/
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/05/meet-...
[3] https://www.zdnet.com/article/manyverse-and-scuttlebutt-a-hu...
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. After trying for a while, I turned to Dat and the Beaker browser, which let me write frontend applications the usual way, with just an api to manage the p2p archives.
Both dat and ssb are javascript projects, so if you want to write your dweb applications using an other language, you're out of luck. I heard there is a rust implementation of dat being worked on that will allow to access an ABI, and thus write bindings for other languages, if it gets to conclusion.
Also, for all dweb stuff, the main current problem IMO is privacy. You can make private discussions on ssb, you can add an encryption layer on top of dat/beaker (I made myself a library using libsodium, that's good enough), but the main focus is about publishing things for the world, like you publish blog posts.
All in all, on my free time, I'm now more interested to work on the dweb than on the web, so I can only encourage people to toy with it.
The lack of multi-device support isn't too much cumbersome?
Also, you do not fear, due to the gossip protocol, that your private messages may be stored forever by peers and one day, your private key leak, and all your conversations are publicly exposed?
> The lack of multi-device support isn't too much cumbersome?
For ssb, it's not a problem for me, because I only use it on my laptop. There's a mobile app that exists, Manyverse, but you have to make a separate account for it, so usually ssb users will have a "john_doe" account and a "john_doe_mobile" one. I guess that's good enough.
For dat, yes, it's been a major problem for me for a while, because I mainly use it to make my own "p2p cloud", so I want my data on mobile as well. There is the Bunsen browser on android, quite experimental while able to load dat urls. Sadly for me, localStorage doesn't work in it, and it's what I use to store my encryption keys. I thought it was hopeless for a while, until I started using Termux (which basically provided a POSIX environment on android). From there, I start dat processes to replicate my data, and I wrote a small server to serve them on 127.0.0.1, which then allow me to use the app in any browser on mobile. Completely hackish, and I can't recommend any sane person to do that, of course:)
> Also, you do not fear, due to the gossip protocol, that your private messages may be stored forever by peers and one day, your private key leak, and all your conversations are publicly exposed?
Yes indeed, this is a real risk for any p2p data. I _think_ it's still better than having them unencrypted on big database known for snooping, but we'll have to deal with that at some point. I guess the best would be to have some sort of encryption capable of autodestructing past a given age, I guess? That's a challenge for cryptographers, especially given it needs to not allow to just set the clock in the past to bypass it. Well, I hope the world will surprise me once again :)
On the other hand, when I thought about that, I also considered it may actually be a good thing, depending on how many years it takes to break the encryption or find the keys. If I'm long dead, I'm fine with my data being decrypted, because otherwise we'll make the work of future historians impossible, if data is sparse and severely encrypted so they can't access it.
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 :] ).
My biggest frustration has been that all usable clients are written in nodejs. I recently took a seven months break to cool off from rage over npm (and yarn, for that matter), but now I'm back again.
Onboarding can be tricky because there are no central servers — it's 100% p2p — but I guess it's easier these days than it was in the beginning. And if you know somebody who is already onboard it shouldn't pose a problem at all.
A better site to start with is probably https://scuttlebutt.nz/
The lack of multi-device support isn't too much cumbersome?
Also, do you not fear, due to the gossip protocol, that your private messages may be stored forever by peers and one day, your private key leaks, and all your conversations are publicly exposed?
I am not overly concerned about leaks of my private key, although the risk is certainly there.
One think many people have to get used to, though, is that the log is append-only: once you've published a message and is no way to delete or undo the message — is it there for “all eternity”. The positive side is that you're more conscious about what you post and why, because there is no way of taking it back.