Comment by jekrb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jekrb | Hacker News Reader

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It's been a while, but I used to be an active SSB user.

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.

> 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.

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.

One cool feature of Scuttlebot is that if you and your friend are already following each other, you only need a connection to each other P2P to be able to send messages to each other. So if you're on a train with ad-hoc WiFi connected to each other, you can still proceed as usual and sync stuff.

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.

For BBSs, you're correct. Usenet (and email) used UUCP, which is actually much closer in concept I think here.

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.

Interesting, I didn't know that (BBS and Usenet was before my time), so thank you for sharing.

That does sound a lot like how Scuttlebot treats feeds as well.

Thank you!

The lack of multi-device support wasn't too much cumbersome?

The lack of multi-device support was a constraint that gave me a different perspective of interactions on the web.

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.

Creating a new account from scratch also means rotating your keys, which is a good practice. As the last few discussions on PGP have shown, the model of having a long-term identity key is more dangerous than it seems, because a single mistake (by you or by the application developer) means so much content can now be leaked. It's probably easier to let the natural connection between people be the vector of long-term trust, which ironically SSB emphasizes on

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